02/21/08

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Ecological and Economic Anthropology; Households, Kinship and Social Organization; Gender; Migration; Environmental Change and Sustainability; Livelihoods and Agriculture; Landcover Change and GIS; Southern Africa; Haiti and the Carribbean, Appalachia and Rural US.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Since 1992 I have conducted fieldwork in both rural and urban areas of Zambia, Central Africa. My current research interests include an examination of migration, agriculture and environmental change in national park buffer zones. From 2001 to 2006 I took undergraduate and graduate anthropology students to Zambia to help collect data and participate in an NSF funded field school for anthropological research methods. CLICK HERE for field school information.

In 2003 I began an National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project on migration and environmental change in a frontier region of Zambia. The project has been a collaboration with two geographers specializing in environmental change, GIS and remote sensing (Jon Unruh, McGill U.; Rod Hay, Cal State Dominguez Hills), and examines migrants' land tenure insecurity in relation to deforestation in a frontier farming region bordering Africa's largest national park - Kafue National Park - in central Zambia.

Primary field research on the project is complete, and now (Spring 2008) we have focused our attention on analyzing the 646 household MS Access data base that includes data on household demographics, livelihoods, agricultural practices, environmental change at the household and community level, tenure systems, local political relationships and migration history. There are approximately 400 qualitative and quantitative variables for each case. In conjunction with analyzing this survey data, we are also analyzing interview and other qualitative ethnographic data in order to create a synthesized and comprehensive ethnographic view of this region of Zambia.

In 2005 my colleague at UK, Deb Crooks and I received another grant from NSF to examine food and nutrition security in the context of migration. During summers 2005 and 2006 we conducted field research collecting migration and livelihood histories with Gwembe Tonga migrants from the environmentally degraded Gwembe Valley, who have moved to the frontier zone bordering Kafue National Park. In addition to collecting data on migration, food security and livelihood repertoires we are collecting anthropometric measures as indices of household and individual well being. We have a number of articles based on the preliminary analyses of these data (see Publications). In 2008 we will carry out another summer of field work on this grant.

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

In addition to these new field research activities, I am one of three new members of the longitudinal Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP), started by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder in 1956. This "next generation" of the GTRP increasingly manages, and determines the direction of this multidisciplinary project, which examines cultural continuity and change in all of its forms and facets. We are currently developing proposals to computerize and manage the more than fifty years of ethnographic and qualitative Gwembe Tonga data, which will be submitted to a number of foundations including Wenner Gren and NEH. Once computerized, this ethnographic resource will be linked to the demographic database which was systematized under an NSF grant from 1995-1998.