Overview
Aisha Fuenzalida Butt is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include how local Latin American coastal communities are affected by environmental protections and conservation through a lens of ecotourism and political ecology. Her work seeks to explore the relationships locals have with their environments, how they experience and (re)define conservation, and how global models of ecotourism are managed and challenged by Indigenous and local knowledge. Her work seeks to examine this by bringing together archaeology and multispecies ethnography to the field of Environmental Anthropology. She aims to produce policy-relevant, ethnographic insights to mitigate the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities and to help foster conservation models and legislation that center local and Indigenous perspectives.
Aisha earned a bachelor’s degree from The City College of New York, where she majored in Anthropology and minored in Women’s and Gender Studies. She graduated as valedictorian of the Colin Powell School. Prior to beginning her Ph.D., she served as a Fulbright ETA Scholar and the Fulbright Canarias Culture and Pedagogy Mentor in the Canary Islands, Spain.