Month: September 2023

Postdoctoral Graduate Scott Schnur published in Nature Energy for co-authored article, A Framework to Centre Justice in Energy Transition Innovations.

Postdoctoral Graduate, Scott Schnur collaborated with researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and other universities published an article in Nature Energy titled A Framework to Centre Justice in Energy. In the article, Scott and his colleagues discuss the important role of community engagement as a tool to promote equity in the green Energy Transition. They propose a framework that developers, planners, government officials, and other stakeholders can use in order to promote energy justice and inclusivity in the critical work that lies ahead in transforming our grid and combating climate change. Scott says, “The article continues my interest in exploring ways to promote equity and justice in relation to emergent climate futures.”

Check out the write up from NREL here!

Dr. Peter Little co-authors Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Towards a Relational and Contextual Approach

Dr. Peter Little, along with two other authors, recently published Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Towards a Relational and Contextual Approach earlier this summer.

What does resilience mean? This is a question frequently asked and one that this book challenges and turns on its head. This book interrogates the increasingly overused concept of resilience by examining its application to a series of case studies focused on pastoralists in Africa. Through anthropological approaches, the book prioritises the localisation of resilience in context and practice; how to promote ‘thinking resilience’ in place of the typical ‘resilience thinking’ approach. Anthropology has the power to raise the vantage point of people and places, make them speak, breath, and live. And this gives to resilience more grounded and quotidian framings: local, relational, political and ever evolving. The authors ask whether development assistance and government intervention enhance the resilience of African pastoralists, while discussing critical topics, such as political power, land privatization, gender, human-animal identities, local networks, farmer-pastoralist relations, and norms and values. The epilogue, in turn, highlights important theoretical and empirical connections between the different case studies and shows how they provide a much more nuanced, culturally and politically meaningful approach to resilience than its common definition of ‘bounce back.’ By approaching resilience from relational and contextual perspectives, the book showcases a counter-narrative to guide more effective humanitarian and development framing and shed light on new avenues of understanding and practicing resilience in this uncertain world.

Purchase your copy from Amazon here!

PhD Student Will Boose has First Peer-reviewed Article Published in Top Social Sciences and Humanities Journal, Histórica.

“Will Boose‘s article offers an ambitious, though still fragmented, history of motorcycle taxis in Peru. It offers three central arguments. First, it highlights that motorcycle taxi drivers have played a fundamental role in the production of urban space. Second, it argues that state, elite, and popular discourses about “informality” and the “modern city” stigmatize motorcycle taxi drivers in ways that are classist and racialized, targeting them for strict policing. Finally, it suggests that if we think with motorcycle taxi drivers and the materiality of motorcycle taxis, we can reveal the contradictions inherent to the “formal”-“informal”, and “modern”-“non-modern” binaries and thus more lucidly analyze urban space and relations.”

Histórica, based in Peru, is aimed at researchers and a specialized public and publishes works evaluated by peers that constitute an original contribution to the knowledge of Peruvian, Andean, and Amazonian history, as well as Latin American history and global history directly related to the history of the Andean region. In addition to works on history and ethnohistory, the journal includes works on art history, historical anthropology, historical linguistics, historical geography, historical demography, memory studies, and every other discipline, subdiscipline, and field of study in the Humanities and Sciences.

Check out the article here!