I’m proud to announce the successful public PhD defence of Hélène Weber, who has worked with me for five years as a doctoral assistant. Hélène researched a practice operating in the spatial, cultural, and political margins of Swiss agriculture: sheep farming. She investigated the on-going transformation of sheep farming in Switzerland, pushed by eco-modernist policies, market institutions and demands, and also by the actors themselves and their practices and relationships (farmers, herders, sheep, grass, dogs…). Hélène’s intuition was that an ethnographic, practice-centred approach to her topic would give different and complementary insights.
Read the rest of this entry »Sheep and shepherds in the Swiss Alps (PhD Hélène Weber)
February 26, 2020
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Political ecology, Research, Smallholder farming | 
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PhD scholarship in political ecology
February 3, 2020I am recruiting a doctoral student to work with me as a graduate assistant in the Development, Societies, and Environments group at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the Université de Lausanne next year. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Political ecology, Research, Teaching | Tagged: bourse d'étude, doctoral studies, political ecology, research assistantship, scholarship | Permalink
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Photo essay on forest change in central Vietnam
December 6, 2019I’m happy to announce that the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d) has published my photo essay regarding our work in the mountains of Thừa Thiên-Huế province in central Vietnam. You can see it here:
https://www.k4d.ch/navigating-forest-changes-in-central-vietnam/
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Political ecology, Research, Uncategorized, Vietnam | Permalink
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Forest livelihood transformations: from wartime ‘A Shau valley’ to today’s A Lưới district
May 1, 2019A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining PhD student Nguyen Thi Hai Van in her field sites in the upland A Lưới district of Thừa Thiên-Huế province, central Vietnam. She introduced me to her key informants, took me around the fields and woodlots, and translated as she conducted a number of focus group sessions. Of the many interesting ideas and observations that emerged, the overall theme was certainly one of the dramatic and rapid changes affecting the peoples’ livelihoods and landscapes.
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Environmental History, Political ecology, Research, Vietnam | Tagged: forest transition | Permalink
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The social and human dimensions of invasive species
December 5, 2018Announcing a special issue on the human and social dimensions of invasive species masterfully coordinated by Ross Shackleton, who came to Lausanne as a post-doctoral scholar funded by the Swiss Government’s Excellence Scholarship, and has prolonged his stay with a lecturer contract. The special issue, published in the Journal of Environmental Management, includes three review papers and thirteen case studies – see the Table of Contents below. In our editorial paper, we review advances in the four main ways people interact with invasive species:
- causing or facilitating invasions
- thinking and feeling about invasions
- being affected by invasions, for better or for worse
- getting together to manage invasions
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Middle-range theories of land system change
September 14, 2018
Patrick leading the reflections
New paper in Global Environmental Change, under the amazing leadership of Patrick Meyfroidt, bringing together and surveying a wide family of theories of land use and land cover change.
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What to do about the ‘neo-Australian’ forests of lowland eastern Madagascar?
August 17, 2018
Neo-Australian landscapes along RN11a in eastern Madagascar: Grevillea, Eucalyptus, Acacia…
Beyond the rice paddies, beyond the orchards of litchi, cloves, and coffee, beyond the rare patches of lemur inhabited natural forest, beyond the swidden fallows, a new landscape has appeared in lowland eastern Madagascar in the past half century. These ‘neo-Australian’ forests include four or five trees introduced from Australia that have, in many ways, become integral to regional lifeways: Read the rest of this entry »
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