Just Ocean and Coastal Futures with Dr. Paige West
About this Event
A cultural and environmental anthropologist by training, earned her Ph.D. in 2000 and joined the Barnard and Columbia faculty in 2001. Since the late 1990s, her research and teaching have focused on the relationships between Indigenous ecological knowledge, environmental conservation, and socio-political transformation in Oceania, particularly in Papua New Guinea, where she has conducted over 110 months of field-based research since 1997. Dr. West’s scholarship bridges the social and environmental sciences, exploring themes such as the intersections of conservation and development, Indigenous alternatives to externally imposed environmental agendas, the symbolic and material engagements with biodiversity, the commodification of ecological knowledge, and climate change. Her more recent work focuses on how ethnographic and Indigenous epistemologies can be brought into dialogue to shape new forms of socio-environmental understanding and practice. Her current research investigates sea level rise, managed retreat, and how communities adapt and forge futures in the face of climate change. She is the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University and the co-founder of the PNG Institute of Biological Research and the Roviana Solwara Skul, two conservation-focused NGOs in Papua New Guinea.
This event is free and open to the public and campus communities. The Morning Keynote will be held at the Cornell Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Click here to learn more about accessibility, directions, and parking at the Schwartz Center.
The Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference brings together future-oriented scholars at all career stages who integrate reparative frameworks into coastal and ocean studies. The purpose of the conference is to share and produce knowledge while imagining, designing, and supporting strategic action. Over three days of individual presentations, invited keynotes, roundtable discussions, workshop sessions, and communal events, participants will acknowledge, identify, and challenge pernicious ocean and coastal inequities including past and present events and structural processes at local, regional, and global scales. This will be an intimate gathering of professional scholars and graduate students from around the US, working domestically and internationally, committed to catalyzing just futures in coastal and ocean studies via knowledge and practice sharing, networking, and solidarity building to reaffirm our commitments to changing the culture of ocean and coastal research and policy in a time of fear and retrenchment.
The Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference is coordinated by of the Ashley School of Global Development and Environment and sponsored by the and the at Cornell University.
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