Faculty Research & Teaching Concentration Area: 

Environmental Anthropology and Sociology

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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.

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology coordinates environmental study and research with FIU’s Department of Environmental Studies, which emphasizes interdisciplinary environmental problem solving, sustainability of social and ecological systems, and natural resources management and policy. Together we offer students with interests in the environment a vibrant community of scholars and fellow students. Integral to our programs is an inter-departmental initiative to offer a Certificate in Sustainable Communities for graduate students and professionals who wish to gain familiarity with social science methods and theories as they apply to the environment. We are currently recruiting graduate students who wish to carry out research in environmental anthropology/sociology for MA and PhD degrees, as well as non-degree seeking professionals who wish to obtain a Certificate in Sustainable Communities.

Our program considers human interactions with the environment at local, regional, national and global scales, and seeks to integrate knowledge from social and natural sciences. Faculty engage in research on a wide variety of issues including natural resource management, conservation and development, environmental bureaucracies, environmental politics and environmental activism; medical anthropology, ethnoecology, and ethnobotanical knowledge; landscape history and historical ecology; environmental values, environmental journalism, risk and disaster studies, and public perceptions of environmental risk. The department’s environmental faculty members have active research projects in the U.S. (especially the Everglades), Mexico, Belize, and Peru.

For application information, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Professor Liliana Goldin at goldin@fiu.edu

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Environmental Courses in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
(Name of faculty currently offering the course is listed in parenthesis)

American Culture and Society: Landscape and Power: ANT 5318 (Ogden)
American Indian Ethnology ANT 4312-U01 (Wiedman)
Anthropology of Food: ANT 4211.02 (Mathews)
Applied Anthropology SYD 6901-U01 (Wiedman)
Ecological Anthropology/Cultural Ecology ANT 3403/ANG 5403 (Mathews)
Environmental Conflicts and Political Ecology ANT 4211.01 (Mathews)
Everglades Cultural History ANT 4211 (02)/EVR-4934 (05) (Ogden)
Graduate Medical Anthropology ANT 6469 (Wiedman)
GIS and Social Research SYD 6901 (Gladwin, Tardanico)
Migration and Environmental Change SYD 6901/ EVR 5935 (Zarger)
Native American Religions ANT 4211/IDS 4920/ REL 3380 (Wiedman)
Seminar in Human Ecology ANG 6932
International Development SYP 5447

Environmental Courses Currently Being Developed in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Historical Ecology/Landscape History (Ogden/Mathews)
Graduate Seminar in Sustainable Communities (Mathews)
Ethnoecology (Zarger)
Conservation, Communities and Globalization (Zarger)

Relevant Courses in Other Departments
Department of Environmental Studies
Population and Environment Issues EVR 4415C (Zarger)
Principles of Sustainable Development EVR 4934 (Scattone)
Human Organizations and Ecosystem Management EVR 4415 (Bray, Zarger)
Restoration Ecology EVR 4934 (Hartley)
Deep Ecology EVR 4934 (Pliske)
Political Economy of the Environment EVR 5935 (Scattone)
Tropical Ecosystems Management EVR 5330 (Bray)
Protected Areas Management EVR 5360 (Heinen)

Department of International Relations
Space, Place and Identity, INR/GEO 6473, (Neumann/Hollander)
Global Food System GEO 4354 (Hollander)

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FACULTY AND RESEARCH INTERESTS

Hugh Gladwin, Associate Professor, Anthropology.
Hugh Gladwin directs FIU's Institute for Public Opinion Research. His main interest is the application of survey research and cultural analysis to understand culturally and demographically diverse urban settings. His particular interest is in modeling interactions between the human population and natural systems such as the South Florida ecosystem and extreme natural events like hurricanes. As someone who is both an anthropologist and survey researcher, he finds geographic information systems (GIS) the most useful research tool, one that enables ethnography to communicate with statistical sampling in studying regions inhabited by millions of people. He is a co-editor of Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disaster.

Andrew S. Mathews, Assistant Professor, Anthropology.
Andrew Mathews is interested in the ways in which states construct knowledge about nature and society, and in how this knowledge is modified or altered by popular resistance. His current research focuses on forestry and conservation institutions in Mexico, exploring the development of state and community forestry institutions over the last century, and investigating how state interventions transformed local understandings of the role of fire in agriculture and forest management. His areas of interest include international conservation and development institutions, the history of state-making in Latin America, as well as anthropology of science, environmental history and historical ecology. He is working on a book on the construction of forestry in Mexico, tentatively titled Forestry Culture: Knowledge, Institutions and Power in Mexican Forest Management 1926-2001. Dr. Mathews teaches courses in Environmental Anthropology, Environmental Conflicts, and the Anthropology of Food.

Laura Ogden, Assistant Professor, Anthropology.
Laura Ogden is interested in how people invest "natural" landscapes with cultural significance. Her current research is with gladesmen in the Florida Everglades, white settlers who traditionally supported themselves by alligator hunting and commercial fishing. In her research, she documents how the gladesmen's Everglades resonates with economic, historic and mythic associations. She also explores how these "local" landscape constructions intersect with and diverge from ecological or scientific understandings. She is the co-author (with Glen Simmons) of an oral history Gladesmen: Alligator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers and is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Ashley Gang: A Landscape Poetics. Her areas of interest include the history and theory of ethnography, experimental writing, and environmental anthropology (particularly political ecology and landscape approaches). In addition, she works with state and federal agencies involved in Everglades Restoration initiatives to develop social science research planning and public engagement strategies.

Dennis Wiedman, Associate Professor, Anthropology.
Dennis Wiedman is the department’s coordinator of undergraduate studies. His interests include medical anthropology, North American Indians, organizational culture, applied anthropology, and ecological anthropology. His special research interest is the increase of diabetes with modernization. His fieldwork extends from the Seminole of South Florida, to the Delaware, Apache, and Cherokee of Oklahoma, to the Inupiat of Alaska. Publications include Ethnohistory: A Researcher's Guide, as well as articles in Human Organization, Medical Anthropology, and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. He was co-general editor of the NAPA Bulletin, and treasurer of the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association.

Rebecca Zarger, Assistant Professor, Anthropology/Environmental Studies.
Prof. Zarger is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on environmental knowledge, ethnographies of childhood, and land use change and conservation in Central America. She has a joint appointment with the Department of Environmental Studies. Her work has focused on how subsistence knowledge is learned, taught, and transformed in Q’eqchi’ Maya communities in Belize. She co-edited the book, Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity and is currently working on a manuscript titled, Situating Practice, Transforming the Landscape: Social Reproduction of Q’eqchi’ Environmental Knowledge. Prior to coming to FIU, Dr. Zarger worked with the Human Dimensions of Global Change Committee of the National Academies of Science in Washington, D.C. on public participation in environmental decision making. Dr. Zarger teaches courses in Ethnoecology, Population and Environment Issues, Migration and Environmental Change; and Conservation, Communities, and Globalization.

Affiliated Faculty

David Bray, Professor, Department of Environmental Studies
David Bray conducts research on community natural resource management in Latin America, particularly southern Mexico. He is carrying out applied research on grassroots organizational dynamics, policy processes, and forest and agroforestry management with a community organization in central Quintana Roo, Mexico. The organization has been sustainably managing nearly 500,000 hectares of dry tropical forest and related ecosystems for over 15 years, but are facing major challenges in managing their mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) resources as well as many lesser-known tropical species. He also conducts research on sustainable agriculture, particularly the social dimensions of organic coffee production and is writing up a four-year study of the social and economic impact of organic coffee production in Chiapas, Mexico.

Rod Neumann Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of International Relations.
Prof. Neumann's interests include social theory and human-environment relations as well as African studies and political ecology. He travels frequently to Africa, especially Tanzania, studying the cultural and historical roots of political conflict between peasantries and conservation advocates, landscape representation and social constructions of nature in European colonialism, contemporary development initiatives, and the introduction of modernity in Africa. His research has been published in Antipode, Society and Space, and Development and Change, among others. In 1994-1995, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in James Scott's Program for Agrarian Studies, where he wrote Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (University of California Press, 1998). In 1997, the National Science Foundation awarded him a research grant for a three-year study of the relationships among property rights, environmental conservation, and social change in Tanzania. Before joining the FIU faculty, Prof. Neumann worked for seven years as a wilderness ranger with the U.S. Forest Service; he also holds a graduate degree in forestry and international development from the University of Idaho.

Gail M. Hollander Assistant Professor: Department of International Relations
Economic Geography, World Food System Theory, Geography of Florida and the Caribbean, Feminist Geography, Regional Development, Agro-Environmental Conflict.

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Emeriti Faculty

William T. Vickers
William Vickers has conducted ethnological fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico, focusing primarily on the human ecology of indigenous communities, native land and civil rights, and frontier development. He is particularly interested in studying the interrelationships among people, nature, and culture and how these evolve through time. Issues include the sustainability of hunting around native Amazonian settlements, the dynamics of shifting cultivation, forest resource use and ethnobotany, and the determinants of settlement patterns in Amazonian societies. He has written on frontier expansion and how it affects indigenous societies, including their social and political responses to externally-imposed pressures. Professor Vickers' books include Los Sionas y Secoyas: Su Adaptación al Ambiente Amazónico, Useful Plants of the Siona and Secoya Indians and Adaptive Responses of Native Amazonians. He been a Fulbright Fellow in Ecuador, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, and a Doherty Foundation Fellow.

Janet R. Chernela
Professor Chernela has taught in the graduate faculty of Florida International University, and as Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and Georgetown University. In addition, she served as Assistant to the Curator of South American Ethnology of the American Museum of Natural History in the preparation of a permanent hall on South American Indians and as Research Professor at INPA, the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil. She joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 2003. Dr. Chernela has conducted fieldwork among indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon for over twenty-five years and is author of the book, The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A Sense of Space as well as sixty articles on issues of indigenous peoples, conservation policy, gender, and language. Recent publications by Chernela discuss a grassroots community development project among riverine peoples at Silves, in the central Brazilian Amazon, a site to which Dr. Chernela has also led an overseas study program.
Chernela has served as a consultant to NGOs, including Cultural Survival, the Nature Conservancy, Ford Foundation, and the Coolidge Center for Environmental Leadership. Projects she proposed for international conservation NGOs include a restoration plan for lands devastated by gold mining in the Yanomami regions of Brazil; a resource management and tourism plan for seven indigenous groups on the Venezuela-Brazil border; and a study abroad program among the Kayapo Indians of Brazil. With indigenous women living in the urban center, Manaus, Brazil, Chernela was founder of AMARN, the Association for Women of the Upper Rio Negro, the first Amerindian women's association in Brazil and its longest-lived Brazilian indigenous organization. Dr. Chernela serves as Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association (AAA); member of the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association, and is President elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. She is former member of the AAA Task Force to look into allegations regarding research activities among the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil and was appointed to the Association's newly formed Commission on Indigenous People. She is on the editorial boards of the journals Hemisphere and the Journal of Latin American Anthropology.

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