CORE FACULTY

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Janet Bokemeier  Sociology

Dr. Bokemeier specializes in studies of gender, work, family, and agriculture in rural America. Her current research program involves:
1. studies of the labor market experiences of rural households and the impact of changing rural labor markets on family inequality and poverty; and
2. social capital, family ties, and household and family adaptive strategies.

Kimberly Chung  Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies

Dr. Chung’s research and outreach interests are in the areas of:
1. community food security with emphasis on marginalized populations;
2. food and nutrition security in developed and developing countries;
3. coping strategies of the poor;
4. participatory research as community development; and
5. mixed methods study design.

Bill Derman  Anthropology

Dr. Derman has been carrying out research in Zimbabwe since 1987, following a long period of research in West Africa. His interests are in environment and change, planned rural development, analyses of development projects, and, more recently, decentralization of natural resource management institutions. For five years (1989 to 1994), he conducted a study of the Mid-Zambezi Rural Development Project, one of the only resettlement projects carried out in communal lands. He then turned to an examination of Zambezi Valley land-use planning in general. With the Centre for Applied Social Sciences, Dr. Derman began a long-term study of the processes of water reform, water management institutions, and decentralization. This study was expanded to include Malawi under the leadership of Dr. Anne Ferguson and became part of the BASIS Collaborative Research Support Program on Land and Water in Southern Africa. Dr. Derman is currently completing a set of papers on land and water reform in Zimbabwe.

Tracy Dobson  Fisheries and Wildlife

Dr. Dobson has published in the areas of sex-based discrimination (abortion and pregnancy), consumer protection, the evolution of law to preserve dwindling biological diversity, and the co-management of fisheries in Malawi. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental law, sex discrimination law, indigenous rights to natural resources, and gender and environment. Along with Dr. Anne Ferguson, she created the GJEC graduate specialization. Her current research interests include co-management of natural resources in Malawi and tribal fishing rights in the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Elizabeth Drexler  Anthropology

Dr. Drexler has done research in Indonesia with environmental and human rights NGOs on issues of political transition, state violence, terror, and problems of transitional justice. In addition, she has worked as a policy analyst in Jakarta. Her research interests include issues of history and memory, political culture, transnational human rights, and NGO movements.

Stephen Esquith  Philosophy/Residential College in the Arts and Humanities

Dr. Esquith's research interests are in moral and political philosophy and philosophy of law. He is the author of Intimacy and Spectacle: Liberal Theory as Political Education and numerous articles in democratic theory. Dr. Esquith is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Philosophical Association, the American Political Science Association, the International Development Ethics Association, and the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. He is on the editorial board of the journal Polity. His areas of teaching competency include:
1. history of political philosophy;
2. contemporary social and political philosophy;
3. philosophy of law;
4. war and morality; and
5. ethics.

Dr. Esquith's research interests include the legal and political problems of democratic transitions and also the social and economic problems of developing countries, with a focus now on development in West Africa. He is one of the core faculty members for the interdisciplinary graduate specialization in Ethics and Development. He teaches a course on the ethics of development (PHL 452), is offering a study abroad program, Ethics and Development in Mali, both of which attract an interdisciplinary student audience, and is completing a new book, Everyday Bystanders: Mass Violence and Democratic Political Education. Dr. Esquith is Acting Dean of the new Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, which has a strong emphasis on world history, ethics, art, and culture.

Kyle Evered  Geography

Dr. Evered's main research interests include cultural and political ecology as found in the Middle East and former Soviet Union (especially in Turkey and Central Asia). In particular, he is engaged in research that focuses on challenges to wetland conservation/preservation in Turkey and matters associated with energy resource procurement. Additionally, he has research interests that deal with geographies of identity and place (especially as associated with ethno-nationalism and both national territoriality and regionalism). In both fields of research - the environmental and the geopolitical - he addresses gender and social justice. With regards to teaching, Dr. Evered offers courses dealing with cultural and political geography, the environment, and regional surveys (especially of the Middle East and of post-Soviet Eurasia).

Anne Ferguson  Anthropology/Center for Gender in Global Context

Dr. Ferguson does research and teaches in the areas of development studies, gender, agricultural and environmental change, and medical anthropology. Her early work in El Salvador in medical anthropology focused on the impacts of multinational pharmaceutical firms' business practices on health care provided at pharmacies, and on the integration of these companies' products into lay and alternative medical practices. In the mid-1980s Dr. Ferguson shifted her research focus to Southern Africa where she has studied development initiatives in the areas of agriculture, fisheries, and water sector reform. Her research in Malawi centers on the gendered social construction of agricultural technology and natural resource management programs and policies. Dr. Ferguson has studied how social and cultural factors shape agricultural technology improvement programs that affect crop biodiversity. She also has examined the social impacts of fisheries policies in Malawi. Currently, her research centers on the gender dimensions of Malawi's new water reform policies.

Geoffrey Habron  Sociology/Fisheries and Wildlife

Dr. Habron's interests are using multidisciplinary, systems-thinking perspectives integrating adaptive management with community-based conservation. He is interested in how community-based, collaborative, or cooperative approaches can be used to foster sound natural resource conservation while acknowledging the input, impact, and context of human communities. His dissertation focused on community-based adaptive watershed management utilizing multiple data collection, quantitative and qualitative methods, and analysis integrated through geographical information systems (GIS). The theoretical bases were adoption-diffusion and symbolic interactions.

Craig Harris  Sociology

Dr. Harris studies the ways in which gender intersects with political economy and political ecology to affect the well-being of both people and the environment. He investigates the roles of homemakers and extension agents in constructing the safety of the household food supply. He also studies the differential roles of men and women in the harvesting, processing, distributing, and consuming of fish, and in the management of fisheries and the establishment of fisheries policy. Dr. Harris conducts research on approaches to pest management in the agrifood systems of developed countries, and on the gendered impacts of different pest management regimes.

Robert Hitchcock  Anthropology

Dr. Hitchcock is a development-oriented anthropologist who concentrates on human rights of indigenous peoples, refugees, women, and small farmers. Much of his work over the past 30 years has been with the San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. He has examined impacts of development projects, resettlement, and tourism on women and minorities in a dozen African countries as well as among refugee populations in the United States. Dr. Hitchcock was a founder of the Committee for Human Rights (CfHR) of the American Anthropological Association and is an executive board member of the Kalahari Peoples Fund, an advocacy organization working on behalf of the San and other peoples of southern Africa.

Daniel Jaffee  Sociology

Dr. Jaffee's research examines the effects of economic globalization and free trade policies on environmental and social conditions for rural communities and small agricultural producers in the global South, particularly Latin America. His work has focused on fair trade as an alternative model of international economic exchange, examining the benefits and limitations of participation in fair trade markets for peasant commodity producers. He has conducted extensive field work in rural Mexico on certified organic and fair trade coffee production and also on indigenous community forestry management as a conservation/development strategy. His book, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability and Survival, is forthcoming from University of California Press. Additional interests include grassroots social movements around sustainable agriculture and resource use in both the North and South, as well as issues of access to and control/privatization of commons resources, particularly water.

Linda Kalof  Sociology

Dr. Kalof researches the cultural representations of humans and other animals, with a focus on the intersection between culture and nature and how marked bodies are socially constructed through visual representations of bodily display and exhibition. Other areas of interest include research methodology and environmental values and ethics. She has published more than 30 papers and book chapters and is editor of Human Ecology Review, an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of the interaction between humans and the environment (http://www.humanecologyreview.org).

John Kerr  Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies

Dr. Kerr's academic background is in agricultural and natural resource economics. He has teaching interests in the effects of property rights and collective action on rural natural resource management and agricultural development in developing countries. Dr. Kerr's focus is particularly on how local institutional arrangements influence environmental and poverty alleviation outcomes. Most of his work has focused on India.

Sabrina McCormick  Sociology/Environmental Science and Policy Program

Dr. McCormick's research interests involve the intersections between health and environment, as well as environmental social movements and the role of science in politics. In the United States, she has examined the emergence and impact of the environmental breast cancer movement, as well as several other health social movements. She is also currently directing a documentary film on three women with breast cancer. Dr. McCormick studies the energy policy and the anti-dam movement in Brazil, with particular attention to new participatory mechanisms the movement has developed.

Maureen McDonough  Forestry/Sociology

Dr. McDonough is interested in applications of social science to natural resource issues. Her specific research interests include public education about forest management, understanding non-forestry publics, and participatory small-scale forestry (social forestry). Dr. McDonough has worked on the following programs:
1. public knowledge and attitudes concerning forest management practices in Michigan;
2. the Urban Resource Initiative: community-driven forestry in Detroit; and
3. social forestry, education, and participation in Thailand.

Laurie Medina  Anthropology

Dr. Medina's research focuses on economic development. Her early work examined the negotiation of agricultural development strategies in Belize. Currently, she is studying ecotourism as a strategy to combine economic development with environmental conservation. Her work explores efforts to implement ecotourism in several Maya villages in the tropical forests of southern Belize. These villages have been caught up in debates over environmentalist and development agendas that are global in scope: their work to implement ecotourism has involved residents of these villages in negotiations with government officials, international development donors, tourists, and local, national, and transnational environmentalist and indigenous rights NGOs. Since these actors bring diverse perspectives and agendas to their interactions, Dr. Medina's research explores how they negotiate the meanings and practices that will be associated with both 'nature' and 'development' as they work together to implement ecotourism. Her research also examines the links between negotiations over development and conservation strategies and Maya struggles for land and autonomy.

Sarah Nicholls  Geography/Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies

Dr. Nicholls' interests as they relate to gender, justice, and environmental change are two-fold:
1. issues associated with tourism planning, development, and impacts (economic, social/cultural, and environmental), especially in international settings; and
2. accessibility and equity as they relate to the distribution of park and recreation resources in urban environments.

Jennifer Olson  Geography/Center for Global Change and Earth Observations

Dr. Olson conducts research on the socioeconomic drivers of land use change and the impact of land use change on the environment. Her particular interest is on how trends in socio-political systems affect rural households, their land management, and land degradation. She is conducting land use research and is project manager of an NSF project examining the interaction between land use and climate change in the East African region (the Climate-Land Interaction Project, CLIP). She also coordinates a research project in East Africa examining the linkages between changes in land use, biodiversity, and land degradation. The research is being conducted by scientists from East African and US institutions. Dr. Olson has lived, worked, and conducted research for many years in several African countries with the International Livestock Research Institute, the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, UN agencies, USAID, and Peace Corps.

Diane Ruonavaara  MSU Extension

Dr. Ruonavaara does research in the areas of international development, gender, sustainable development, and indigenous knowledge. She works as a specialist in program evaluation. Her early research in Nicaragua examined agrarian reform issues and its impact on the production of basis grains. Her research in Guatemala focused on local knowledge and practices relating to traditional household gardens of the Itza Mayan and mestizos in the Peten region. In Mexico, Dr. Ruonavaara did participatory research with an indigenous organization acting as a catalyst for organizational and community change. Her current work in Ecuador takes a participatory plant breeding approach, bringing together professional plant breeders with groups of Quichua and AfroEcuadorians farmers through Local Committees of Agricultural Research.

Gretchen Sanford  Agricultural Technology Institute

Dr. Sanford joined the Institute in December of 1999 as coordinator of the Agricultural Industries certificate program. The primary focus of the program is agri-business management. She advises students in this program as well as oversees their internship experiences.

Cynthia Simmons  Geography

Dr. Simmons is a human geographer whose research program addresses the interaction of economic development and environmental policy in Less Developed Countries. She is especially interested in the social consequences of these interactions, and much of her current work examines agrarian reform and land conflict in the Brazilian Amazon. Although this part of the world has attracted much of her attention, given the importance of the Amazon basin to biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity, she has also conducted comparative research on forest management practices of indigenous and non-indigenous farmers in the Republic of Panama, and has engaged in cross-national studies examining economic development, urbanization, and sustainability in China, India, and the United States.

Sieglinde Snapp  Crop and Soil Sciences

Dr. Snapp focuses her research on understanding the principles of resilient cropping system design and biologically-based soil management. A particular area of interest is the feedback loops in nitrogen and phosphorus availability mediated by plants and associated microbes. To foster outreach and education on soil ecological management, she coordinates a Website at MSU on applied soil ecology. She developed the mother and baby trial design to link long-term research trials systematically with on-farm experimentation. Because collaborations among social and biological scientists are essential in a rapidly changing world, she works closely with multidisciplinary teams, including scientists, farmers, students, advisors, and extension educators, to foster farmer innovation and building more sustainable, environmentally-friendly cropping systems. The participatory research methods and on-farm research trial designs she works on have been adopted by agronomists and plant breeders in 16 countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Paraguay.

Dr. Snapp's teaching interests include a new course with Dr. Phil Robertson and Soil Biology (CSS 360) and contributing cropping systems and participatory lectures to courses in CSS, as well as courses such as ANP 859, a core requirement of the GJEC specialization. As a core faculty member of the African Studies Center and the Center for Gender in Global Context, she is committed to education and scholarship in area studies and international development, including promoting south-south linkages and extending the agro-ecology lessons of the field crop Long-Term Ecological Research to Southern and West Africa.

Robert Walker  Geography

Dr. Walker is an economic geographer whose research focuses on land use and land cover change. Although his primary interest is in developing theoretical explanation of how such change occurs, he has an abiding interest in field studies, in which he is an active participant. For the past ten years, Walker has focused much of his attention on the Brazilian Amazon, where he has conducted three large-scale surveys of colonists in the forest regions of the eastern Amazon. Dr. Walker combines data from these field studies with satellite imagery to develop insight into the processes driving tropical deforestation and, in particular, the role played by family structure in these processes. Dr. Walker's research is not restricted to the tropics, however, and he has studied the dynamics between urban and rural land uses in North America. His teaching interests are in land use dynamics, population and the environment, and GIS/Remote Sensing applications.

Antoinette WinklerPrins  Geography

Dr. WinklerPrins' research interests include:
1. people-environment geography, especially in Brazilian Amazonia;
2. cultural and political ecology;
3. indigenous/local environmental knowledge (especially soils);
4. smallholder agriculture in less developed countries;
5. anthropogenic landscapes, tropical soils, and fluvial geomorphology; and
6. homegardens and urban agriculture.

Dr. WinklerPrins has had ten years of experience working in the Brazilian Amazon, doing local-level qualitative research on land use change and agriculture, particularly in the floodplain environment. Her early work in the region focused on soil use and management, and on indigenous knowledge systems, especially of soils. Currently, she is conducting research on urban agriculture. She is tracking the germplasm and product flows to understand the complex social networks that tie together urban and rural zones.

Wynne Wright  Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies

Dr. Wright's research, teaching, and outreach activities broadly examine social change in the agri-food system. She is particularly interested in examining the socio-political drivers of change and its impact on farm families and rural communities. In the domestic context, she has conducted social impact assessments of confined animal feeding operations in Minnesota, investigated the transformation of the tobacco system in Kentucky, and studied the social construction of BSE (mad cow disease). Dr. Wright has an ongoing interest in the gendered nature of agricultural restructuring. Most recently her work was turned toward the study of food system localization. Currently, she is exploring the contradictions in local food system initiatives and their capacity for invigorating local communities and inspiring a 'civic agriculture.' A second project explores the social impacts of the bio-economy for rural Michigan communities. Dr. Wright is also interested in examining the condition of east-central European farmers in the post-Soviet agrarian transition. In this work, she has been following the impact of European Unification on agriculture and rural communities.

Leo Zulu  Geography

Dr. Zulu's primary research focus is on people-environment interactions in a rural development context, focusing on the miombo biome of southern Africa. Specific research areas include political ecology; environment and development; community-based natural resources management in rural Africa; deforestation; food security; socio-spatial, temporal, and biophysical processes of land use and land cover change in Africa and the techniques that permit their examination, including Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems; and vulnerability and adaptation of rural communities in southern Africa to climate change.