Other Research Projects

Environmental Uncertainties and Livelihood Thresholds in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

Principal Investigator: Kelley Crews
Additional Investigator: Brian King, The Pennsylvania State University
Funded by: National Science Foundation

This research will combine insights from both social and natural sciences to understand how variability and uncertainty in time and space impact human-environment interactions. The project will examine social responses to environmental variability, particularly precipitation and flooding. Of interest is how people maintain their livelihoods, and further how these strategies change in anticipation and in response to environmental change. Thus this work will also characterize the patterns of precipitation and flooding as well as their impacts on household farming, household collection of materials such as reeds, grasses, and wood, and individual entry into the tourism sector. The work will be positioned in the international treaty-recognized Wetland of Importance, the Okavango Delta (OD) of Botswana. Nestled within the Kalahari (Kgaligadi) Desert and flooded each year from Angolan highland precipitation, the OD has experienced vastly dramatic changes in precipitation and flooding in the last several decades. This rural area's population is highly dependent on the natural resource base, either directly (e.g., farming, reed collection) or indirectly (e.g., the wildlife-oriented ecotourism industry). It is therefore further hypothesized that these fluctuations have increased people's uncertainty about the availability of water and the timing / magnitude of flooding, impacting their decisions about which and how many livelihood strategies to employ. The overall project research goals are as follows: 1) quantify environmental change in the OD human-environment system, with particular respect to precipitation and flooding; 2) capture the distribution of natural resources over space and time using field-collected and satellite-derived data; 3) map resource activity areas and management / tenure systems to better understand livelihood decision-making; 4) assess how environmental change impacts livelihood strategy selection, and, in turn, how these decisions impact the environment; and 5) evaluate the utility of a human-environment system framework for understanding dynamic systems such as the OD.

Collaborative Research: Measuring International Nongovernmental Organizations and World Polity Network Embeddedness

Principal Investigator: Pamela Paxton
Additional Investigator: Melanie Hughes, University of Pittsburgh
Funded by: National Science Foundation

For this project, the investigators will link world polity and social networks to inform the development of a new over-time measure of country-level connectedness to the world polity, labeled the "INGO Network Country Score." This measure will score countries by their centrality in the world country-INGO network. The resulting published dataset will be useful to a cross-disciplinary audience. In a second part of the project, an in-depth analysis is carried out on one domain of INGOs-Women's International Nongovernmental Organizations, or WINGOs. The investigators draw upon theories of the international women's movement to provide testable theories about expected changes in the WINGO network structure over time.

CAREER: Rural Transformation and Latino Transnational Migration and Settlement in the U.S. South

Principal Investigator: Rebecca Torres
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Over the past decade a "new geography" of Latino transnational immigration has emerged with a shift towards the southeastern U.S. and more "permanent" settlement of families. Much of this growth has occurred in rural areas that have transformed rapidly from historically biracial to multi-ethnic communities. North Carolina, with the highest Latino growth rate among all U.S. states over the past decade, provides a unique opportunity to analyze "early stage" migration and settlement processes. Project research objectives include: 1) Identify how key micro and macro factors have shaped the migration and settlement of Latinos in the rural South; 2) Explain how Latino migration and settlement in the rural South has restructured economic, social and racial/ethnic relations in both origin and destination communities; 3) Analyze the transnational networks and relations Latinos construct over time and space linking them to homeland place of origin, U.S. gateway cities and new rural home communities in the South; and 4) Identify the most effective approaches to building new community and economic development initiatives that incorporate Latinos. The geographic focus of this multi-sited project includes three rural eastern N.C. communities, neighboring cities of the east and a town in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacan (Mexico) with strong transnational ties to eastern N.C. This project will take a theoretically eclectic approach including multi-level analysis, gender analysis, inter-group relations and transnational paradigms. The research will employ a "mixed method" approach including: 1) Qualitative Interviews with Latino Families and Non-Latino residents in N.C. Rural Communities and with Key Informants; 2) Quantitative eastern N.C. Survey of Non-Latino Resident Attitudes and Perceptions of Latino Migration and Settlement; and 3) "Michoacarolina" Transnational Case Study in collaboration with the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). Through an integrated program of research, education and outreach, this project seeks to make a significant contribution to the growing academic literature on the new geography of Latino migration, particularly to rural areas in the South; to develop urgently needed curricula that will integrate migration studies into various ECU academic programs; to mentor and support minority graduate students specializing in migration; and to provide outreach that will improve service delivery for initiatives targeting Latino communities.