Educational Institutions and Programs
This is a working list of programs of anthropological instruction on environmental studies or ecology. We welcome descriptions of other departments or programs in the area of environmental anthropology.
This is a working list of programs of anthropological instruction on environmental studies or ecology. We welcome descriptions of other departments or programs in the area of environmental anthropology.
The School of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies (SAGES) at University of Melbourne, Australia
The School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies (SAGES)is an large interdisciplinary Department at one of Australia's top research universities. Masters in Development Studies, Geography, and Environment - by research, or by coursework and thesis are offered, along with a 3/4 year doctoral program. Environmental anthropologists on the faculty include Monical Minnegal and Peter Dwyer (Papua New Guinea and Australia), and geographer/political ecologists Simon Batterbury (Africa) and Lisa Palmer (indigenous Australia). In addition, Jon Barnett and Peter Christoff offer environmental expertize in the Pacific and Australia, and instruction and laboratories are are available for a range of ecological techniques.
Anthropological Center for
Training and Research on Global Enviromental Change
Indiana University
Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change
located at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, was designed to provide
interdisciplinary research and training in the human dimensions of environmental
change. The center is particularly interested in conducting research and finding
effective strategies for the restoration of degraded environments and for the
development of sustainable uses of natural resources. The center's research
focuses on local populations' management of natural resources and monitoring
these activities with the use of remote sensing technologies and field studies.
The center is designed to be interdisciplinary in nature and places emphasis
on local, human responses to environmental change. The center provides facilities
for research by faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, and visitors from
NGO and other organizations." -- A & E newsletter, May '96. The program
is directed by Emilio F. Moran.
Centre for the
Comparative Study of Culture
Development and the
Environment
University of Sussex
The Centre for the Comparative Study of Culture, Development and the Environment
is one of a number of Graduate Research Centres at the University of Sussex.
We address the common problems arising from the relationship between 'North'
and 'South', and we have a special, but by no means exclusive, interest in
the development process.
Conservation, Biodiversity and Sustainable Economic Development Program
University of Arizona
"The Conservation Biodiversity and Sustainable Economic Development has
the goal of evaluating alternative strategies for minimizing the negative
impacts on biological and cultural diversity resulting from the exploitation
of newly discovered biological resources and identifying alternative strategies
for ensuring that economic and social benefits accrue to local and national
economies as a consequence of the exploitation of pharmaceutically useful
medicinal plants." --A & E newsletter, April '96
Department of Anthropology
and Ecology
University of Geneva
No information available.
Ecological Anthropology
University of Hawai'i
The Department of Anthropology offers a specialization in ecological anthropology at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels. Within the Ecological Anthropology Program, students may pursue their own individual track of courses, or one or both concentrations: Environmental Anthropology and Conflict Resolution Concentration, and Spiritual Ecology Concentration. Further information can be found on the homepage of Dr. Leslie E. Sponsel, Director, Ecological Anthropology Program: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/Sponsel
Ecological Anthropology and Ethnobiology
University of California, Riverside
The Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Riverside,
offers a special focus for graduate education in Ecological Anthropology
and Ethnobiology, including agriculture and agrarian issues. This focus
integrates all the traditional subfields of anthropology: the four classic
subfields of archaeological, biological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology,
and the "fifth field" of applied and practical work. Faculty from all
the four fields cooperate in offering the program. We also cooperate
with faculty in other departments at UCR. The major areas of active work
within this specialty focus are: Agriculture, Food Production, and Agrarian
Issues; Archaeology and Prehistory of Subsistence Systems; Ethnobiology
and Ethnoscience; Human and Higher Primate Evolutionary Ecology; Human
Reproductive Ecology; and Political Ecology.
Environmental
Anthropology Program
University
of Washington
Environmental Anthropology (EA) is a new interdisciplinary graduate program
based in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington (UW).
Its purpose is to provide a coherent framework for graduate students wishing
to study environmental topics from an anthropological perspective, while building
and maintaining strong interdisciplinary connections. Further details on the
program can be obtained from visiting its web site.
Department of Anthropology
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia's graduate program in anthropology is focused on ecological and environmental anthropology and takes advantage of the university's well established tradition in ecological research. In addition to the anthropology department, the university also houses the Odum School of Ecology, The College of Environment and Design, the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. The Anthropology Department is headed by Ted Gragson, and the faculty include Rene Bobé, Pete Brosius, Erv Garrison, David Hally, Steve Kowalewski, Virginia Nazarea, Don Nelson, Elizabeth Reitz, Robert Rhoades, Susan Tanner, Bram Tucker, Julie Velásquez Runk, Chris Joseph, Sergio Quesada and Mark Williams. Laboratory facilities for ethnoecology/biodiversity, conservation research, climate change, agriculture and natural resources, archaeology, cultural and political ecology, health and human biology, paleoanthropology and paleoecology,and zooarchaeology are available in the program. Ongoing interdisciplinary team research projects may provide opportunities for students to pursue dissertation research in North America, South America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa and Europe.
Rutgers University
The anthropology graduate program at
Rutgers offers a new specialty in environmental anthropology. "The Human Ecology
Department at Rutgers is a multi-disciplinary research and teaching department
committed to addressing the human dimensions of environmental problems and
includes the participation of faculty from the departments of geography, psychology,
sociology and anthropology. The department was created in 1973 by Andrew Vayda.
The program includes specialists in ecological theory, cognitive theory,medical
anthropology, fisheries and marine conservation, livestock pastoralism,tropical
forest use as well as suburban lifestyles and environmentalism, risk management,
and international environmental studies." Click here to visit the Human
Ecology web site at Rutgers University.
Program in Cognitive Studies
of the Environment
Northwestern University
Northwestern University's Program in Cognitive Studies of the Environment is
an interdisciplinary research consortium made up of cultural anthropologists,
cognitive psychologists, ecologists, biologists, and linguists. Our goal is
to apply theories of decision making, concept formation, and reasoning to policy-relevant
goals for an integrated assessment of humankind's changing relationship to
its natural resources, such as forests, fauna, wetlands and waters. We are
working in geographically diverse areas, such as Guatemala, southern Mexico
and northern Wisconsin on problems related to the field of cognition, environmental
decison making etc. As an interdisciplinary research program it provides the
cultural anthropologist with challenging views and methods from other fields,
that enrich each individuals view.
Tropical Conservation and Development Program
Department of Anthropology
University of Florida
The Ecological Anthropology concentration in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida provides graduate training in anthropology with an interdisciplinary focus on human interactions with the biophysical environment. The Deparment of Anthropology at UF is one of the top-ranked programs in the country. The anthropology department at UF is a four-field department with a strong tradition in applied anthropology as well, with 36 faculty and 19 affiliates. The wide range of faculty research and interests in the department ensures that students receive a well rounded education in anthropology in addition to their specialization in ecological anthropology. 18 faculty participate in the Ecological Anthropology concentration. Graduate education in ecological anthropology at both the masters and Ph.D. level involves rigorous training in research design and methodology, anthropological theory and the development of professional skills. The philosophy underlying the concentration is to allow maximum flexibility in students' course of study, in consultation with their advisory committee. Thus, there are not any required courses within the concentration but students are expected to take a wide range of courses, in the anthropology department and beyond, on human-environment interactions.
Faculty research interests and expertise related to ecological anthropology include agroforestry, conservation and sustainable livelihood improvement, development and environmental change, ecology of complex societies, environmental disaster and change, ethnobiology, ethnobotany, GIS, historical ecology, human ecosystem theory, human health and the biophysical environment, hunter/gatherer ecology, land use and land cover change, non-human primate ecology, nutrition and the biophysical environment, paleoecology of early humans, archaeology and paleoenvironment, plant domestication, political ecology, remote sensing, and zooarchaeology. Geographical areas include Amazon, Andes, Caribbean, Latin America, Mesoamerica, North America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Lab facilities include GIS/Remote Sensing, Anthropological Data Analysis, Ethnobotanical Herbarium, Southeastern U.S. Archaeology, Mesoamerican Archaeology, Visual Anthropology, and Biological Anthropology. Students also collaborate with anthropologists in the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Students are encouraged to participate in interdisciplinary centers and institutes at the University of Florida. These include the Land Use and Environmental Change Institute (LUECI), Tropical Conservation and Development Program (TCD), Institute for Archaeology and Paleoenvironmental Studies, Environmental Archaeology Program, H.T. Odum Center for Wetlands, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Asian Studies, and the Center for African Studies among others. Also, the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) contains 280 faculty from 49 departments and 11 colleges working on a broad range of issues of potential interest to anthropology graduate students concerned with environmental research..
Gender, Justice and Environmental Change
Michigan State University
The Gender, Justice and Environmental Change Program (GJEC) is a graduate specialization available as an elective for students who are enrolled in master's and doctoral degree programs at Michigan State University. The specialization is sponsored jointly by the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the College of Social Science. This program, first offered in Fall 2000, is the first of its kind in the nation explicitly focusing on the intersection of gender, environmental change, and social and environmental justice. The program is designed in particular to examine these issues and processes from both local and global perspectives, challenging traditional dichotomies between the First and Third World, the North and the South.
The GJEC program offers graduate students a supportive and rigorous academic environment for exploring these issues as well as credentials demonstrating specialized training in the field. The specialization is intended to (1) provide graduate students from different disciplinary backgrounds with the analytical and methodological tools to address environmental issues from gender relations and social justice perspectives; (2) provide students with a global perspective on environmental issues by drawing out local-global linkages; (3) foster the growth of research, service, and interdisciplinary collaboration in the fields of gender and environmental studies; and (4) increase awareness among faculty, students, and the public of the linkages between gender and the environment, both domestically and internationally.
Environmental Anthropology and Sociology
Florida International University
Environmental change, environmental management, degradation, global warming, depletion of natural resources. As never before, the environment has come to be a key concern for citizens and policy makers around the world. Anthropologists and sociologists at FIU have important contributions to make to these debates, using their distinctive theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze the interactions between humans and their natural environments, to call into question such apparently natural categories as nature and culture, north and south, environmental degradation and restoration, to analyze the social structures which seek to control environments and people, and to examine the formation of new environmental political identities.
The Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami has recently become home to one of the largest concentrations of environmental anthropologists in the country. We invite students to take advantage of this new opportunity to study with a growing community of scholars. The range of expertise in the department allows students to work on research projects that draw upon the full breadth of environmental anthropology approaches, and to engage with the politics of nature as they are contested on multiple sociospatial scales from the local to the global. FIU’s geographical location in Miami, next to the Everglades and as gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, provides a uniquely stimulating research laboratory for studying issues of place, space, power and identity. Moreover, the faculty in our department and at FIU in general constitutes one of the richest concentrations of Latin American and Caribbean scholars anywhere.
University of South Carolina
If you are considering graduate studies in cultural/political ecology, development, and/or human security and vulnerability, I encourage you to consider geography at the University of South Carolina. Over the past five years we have hired nine new faculty members to replace retiring senior colleagues, adding new concentrations of faculty expertise that complement our existing strengths. We are especially pleased with the complementary research and teaching foci shared by our human geographers. We are especially eager to attract qualified graduate students who share our interests in:
- Societal change, sustainability, and human security;
- Culture, place, and power; and
- Environmental transformations
Each of these areas is cooperatively supported by our faculty members who bring a diversity of methodological approaches and active research experience to seminars and advising. As a result, we can offer students a well-rounded array of perspectives and empirical depth in these areas within a supportive and collaborative setting. In addition, our department continues to offer students excellent training in the GISciences and physical subfields, which are easily integrated with interests in human geography. We are confident that students will find our graduate program to be a rich and fulfilling experience.
Department of Anthropology
University of Kentucky
Livelihoods, Ecology, and Change
This graduate concentration in the Anthropology Department at the University of Kentucky brings together theoretical frameworks and disciplinary content from economic and ecological anthropology, and intersects with analysis of social process, in the past and present. A focus on livelihoods captures the ways in which access to social, economic, and ecological resources shape people's pursuit of different income and social strategies. At the University of Kentucky we train students to become professional anthropologists who can engage in both academic and non-academic settings, with strong foundations in theoretical and substantive areas. Some of the faculty research in this concentration includes: migration, land use practices and environmental change in Zambia; livelihood and nutrition security among migrants in Zambia; fair trade coffee and commodity chains in Central America; nutrition and poverty in eastern Kentucky, USA; socio-economic and political complexity among the Olmec; Spanish contact period economic and political systems in the U.S. Southeast, agricultural origins in the eastern U.S., and prehistoric household economy in Mesoamerica. We welcome students with interests in these issues, as well as students with complimentary research interests in ecological / economic anthropology.
PhD in Ecological Anthropology
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Ecological anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio is a holistic and rigorous doctoral program that focuses on the ways in which human and nonhuman primates are embedded within ecological processes and political-economic realities. Course offerings view ecological anthropology through multiple lenses, including political, cultural, and evolutionary ecology; the social landscapes and economic transformations of current societies, ancient hunters and gatherers, and past complex societies; the ecology, biology, and conservation of nonhuman primates; the anthropology of medical care and human health; and methods in resource management, biodiversity conservation, and intercultural collaboration. Geographical research areas for archaeology include the American Southwest, Texas, Northwest Mexico, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America. Our biological anthropologists conduct research in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Neotropics. The cultural anthropologists work in the United States, Mexico, US-Mexico borderlands, Lowland South America, Island Pacific, and East and West Africa. With training that is both academic and applied, the graduates of UTSA’s doctoral program in ecological anthropology are uniquely prepared to understand and to engage the environmental challenges of a transforming world. Each year a certain number of competitive fellowships will be awarded to entering doctoral students. Fellowships will be renewed for two successive years pending an annual review process. University and Departmental grants and scholarships are also available. In addition, doctoral students have the opportunity to work as teaching and research assistants. Assistantships will vary, but minimally will entail quarter-time appointments (10 hours per week).