Governance of forests, food commodities, and rivers: introducing my current doctoral team

May 25, 2018

I’d like to introduce my current doctoral team, who are a great pleasure to work with.  Their research interests have coalesced around the political ecology of environmental governance, specifically of forests, commodities, and rivers.  In other words, who decides, who wins, who loses, and why, when decisions are made about trees, water, fish, cocoa, and sheep?  What ideas are decisions based on, and how does the materiality of the object shape the outcomes?  Here are some brief words on the team and their interests, grouped by three general themes: Read the rest of this entry »


Field studies in the High Atlas

November 29, 2016

We have just inaugurated a new field trip to Morocco with grand success for our masters program*. The idea is to give our masters students experience in “the field” before they head off for their independent fieldwork for their masters thesis. We sought to expose them to the pleasures and challenges of fieldwork that involves linguistic, cultural, and logistical barriers, and build their “soft skills”. To do so, we brought them to a cluster of villages perched on a mountain side in the High Atlas, and – during 4 days of intensive field surveys, interviews, muddy boots, and mint tea – learn what we could about how the villages manage their water, their waste, their cropfields, their pastures, and the touristic potential of the region.

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The villages of Annamer and Aguerd

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