Alumna Update: Courtney Work '14 was awarded a 2017 NEH Senior Humanities Research Fellowship from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. Congratulations, Courtney!
"Climate Change and Co-management in Prey Lang: Social experiments in conflict transformation"
This project will investigate new collaborative initiatives between sub-national government officials and the Prey Lang Community Network designed to enhance forest protection and decrease deforestation. Current conflicts between multiple stakeholders will make this cooperation challenging. Dr. Work questions whether, or to what extent, two discourses can transform conflicts into socially and environmentally just outcomes. The first is global climate change—affecting all stakeholders at some level. The second is PLCN attention to, and honoring of, the spirit owner of the land—recognized by the majority of competing stakeholders. This an initiative to gather textured data about resource negotiations at the grassroots level and to complicate the over-naturalized notion that humans will compete over scarce resources with escalating violence.
Courtney Work is a post-doctoral researcher with the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and a Senior Research Fellow for CAORC with the Center for Khmer Studies in Phnom Penh. She received her PhD in from Cornell University and an MA in and Women’s and Gender Studies from Brandeis University.
Work has conducted research in Cambodia since 2005. Her broad research interests include the of Religion, Development, and the Environment; the History of Southeast Asian political formations; Contemporary Political Ontology; and the study of regional flows of people and power in Southeast Asia.
