Category Archives: by Johan Enqvist

We’re excited to extend a public invite to Unruly, a theatre play produced by Empatheatre as part of the Unruly Natures project. The show delves into the experiences of residents living alongside urban baboons on the Cape Peninsula, starring internationally renowned performer Andrew Buckland. During 1-7 June we will tour Ocean View, Kommetjie, Constantia, Simon’s Town,Continue reading “Experience “Unruly”: A Theatrical Exploration of Human-Baboon Relations”

Yesterday the Unruly Natures team received some good news: our Swedish funder Formas approved our application to their Communications call. This means that we will receive some additional funds to “communicate and popularise research results regarding sustainable development for knowledge to be used and create benefit in society.” In our case, this means that weContinue reading “Communications grant – and PhD for Kinga!”

As announced in a previous post, we are currently working with Empatheatre to hold a series of community meetings including a theatre performance and a facilitated dialogue. We are excited to announce that we will work with award-winning South African actor and playwright Andrew Buckland. He will star in what will be a small production thatContinue reading “Empatheatre updates”

Today is a big day for the Unruly Natures project: We are finally ready to share some of the findings from the survey that was conducted last year! Academic research moves slowly, and we are still analysing the bulk of the data and expect to submit multiple articles to peer-reviewed journals. However, some of theContinue reading “A first look at some findings”

2023 ended with some dramatic scenes playing out in parts of our study area, as wildfires threatened both people’s and baboons’ homes around Simon’s Town. We hope everyone has stayed safe, and had an otherwise calm and restful summer holiday. The focus for 2024 will be a bit different for Unruly Natures than for 2023.Continue reading “New year, new phase of the project”

On the last day of November and before Kinga had to go back to Sweden, we met once more with our Advisory Board for some updates and to plan activities in 2024. The maybe most exciting thing was a first look at some preliminary results from our survey, and discussions about how to best shareContinue reading “Third Advisory Board meeting”

Today, we finally reached the goal of collecting 500 survey responses. It took a few weeks longer than planned, mainly because of the rains, but we are super happy to have reached this far! We have completed data collection in Ocean View, Da Gama Park, Constantia, Murdock Valley, Imhoff’s Gift, Zwaanswyk and Tokai, and haveContinue reading “Fieldwork completed!”

Data collection is progressing well, by now we have over 250 responses to the survey and have expanded from Ocean View and Capri to Da Gama Park, Simon’s Town, Murdock Valley, Tokai and Zwaanswyk. As winter is setting in, heavy rain has forced us to stay home on some days which is causing some delays.Continue reading “Rainy days and media attention”

After a full day’s training on 9 May, the research team set out to start data collection in Capri and Ocean View. We are very grateful for how friendly and welcoming residents have been, and how many have filled out our survey so far. Some of you have raised very valid questions that we realisedContinue reading “First week of data collection complete”

Next week we will begin conducting surveys, starting first in Capri and Ocean View and then moving on to other baboon-visited neighbourhoods. Together with four fieldworkers (Akhona, Claire, Jason and Randall), Luke and I will be knocking on doors to invite residents to participate. We will all wear ID badges with our names and lightContinue reading “Data collection about to start!”