Chenai Murata, BA BA (Hons) MA PhD

 Contact

Telephone: +43 1 4277 43217
Moblil: +43 676 9852154

E-mail: chenai.murata@univie.ac.at
Office hours: by arrangementnach

 Profile

Chenai Murata is a post-doctoral assistant at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Vienna. Born in Zimbabwe, Chenai is a transdisciplinary scholar who graduated with an Honours in History from the University of Fort Hare and a PhD in Environmental Science from Rhodes University, both in South Africa. His research interests focus the field of indigenous knowledge system, particularly its two branches of traditional ecological knowledge and customary (communal) land tenure. Basing some of their truth-claims on metaphysical beings  and events that are not empirically observable and logically provable, including supernatural ancestral power, taboos, dream knowledge, sacredness and customary heredity, traditional ecological knowledge and customary land tenure do not only suffer a myriad of misinterpretations and undue criticism in contemporary scholarship, but are also, by and large, relegated to a mere  alternative way of knowing and a subaltern status in an epistemically plural global society dominated by the scientific knowledge system whose roots are in the Western culture. The major practical implication of this is that both the state and private sector often exclude these modes of society-nature relations in the designing and implementation of environmental and land tenure programs. Chenai underpins his research inquiries by the theories of critical realism and historicism. Critical realism´s axiom of epistemic pluralism and admission that all knowledges are fallible, offer a repudiation of mono-epistemism, a colonial legacy which privileges scientific supremacism. And historicism offers a theoretical aperture through which to see the influence of the historical process in the multiple configurations that contemporary social phenomena have assumed.  In pursuing these themes, Chenai wishes to contribute to the growth of an enlightened scholarship that can accelerate the decolonization of African environmental and land administration history.

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  • Recent Academic Publications

    Chenai Murata, Lonias Ndlovu, Lloyd Ganyani & Nelson Odume (2022). Demystying customary land tenure in legally plural sub-Saharan Africa Journal of Law, Society and Development. (9/2022 |  #13662 |: 1- 17.

    Gladman Thondhlana, Stephen Mark Redpath, Pål Olav Vedeld, Lily van Eden, Unai Pascual, Kate Sherren & Chenai Murata (2020). Non-material costs of wildlife conservation to local communities and implications for conservation interventions. Biological Conservation, 246: 1-9.

    Chenai Murata, Sukhmani Mantel, Chris de Wet & Anthony R Palmer (2019). Lay knowledge of ecosystem services in rural Eastern Cape, South Africa: Implications for intervention program planning.  Water and Economic Policy, 5(2): 1-29.

    Chenai Murata, Adam F Perry & Jonathan Denison (2018). Dynamics of water allocation and use  among competing needs within the homestead: Quantifying multiple water uses in rural Eastern Cape.  Africanus: Journal of Development Studies, 47(2): 1-29.

  • Supervision

    MSc Water Management; Water security challenges and distributive and contextual equity dimensions of related municipal response measures in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality. Institute for Water Research, Rhodes University, 2023-2024. 

    MSc Water Management: Equity dimensions of ecosystem service flow in the Kat River Catchment in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Institute for Water Research, Rhodes University, 2022-2023.

    Honours Geography: Procedural equity dimension of water security challenges and municipal responses in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Department of Geography at Rhodes University, 2023. 

    BSc Environmental Science: Local people’s perception of plastic littering in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Department of Environmental Sciences at Rhodes University, 2019. 

Last updated: 12.04.2024