About My Research

My research explores the intricacies of conflict and collaboration in managing multiple-use landscapes. Collaboration is essential for effective, equitable, and flexible management, yet it can be challenging as people navigate layers of politics, history, uncertainty of ecological systems, and diverse ways of using, valuing, and thinking about landscapes. I investigate the complex roots of contention and the creative work of developing new connections across divides.

The Zooarchaeology Laboratory specializes in the analysis of vertebrate remains from archaeological sites, but also works with invertebrate, paleontological, and ecological samples. The comparative collection numbers over 5,000 vertebrate and invertebrate specimens with an emphasis on animals from the southeastern United States, adjacent waters, and the Caribbean.

I am a PhD candidate in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology and am completing a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. My research explores how scientists strategically transform scientific practice towards more equitable processes. In particular, I am interested in how practicing feminist science shapes how knowledge is produced and how scientists are made.

Megan Anne Conger's current research considers how relationships between Indigenous communities in Southern Ontario changed over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries.  In particular, she is investigating the differential timing of early interactions between European settlers and people in Native communities, considering the possibility that Native communities engaged in these interactions in a variety of ways other than simple acceptance or rejection. Her work integrates traditional trade good analysis (glass beads, metal artifacts) with Bayesian Chronological Model

A cultural-ecological anthropologist by training, Shelly examines how historic, intersectional inequalities shape social and ecological experiences of environmental change in rural communities. She has worked with coal-mining communities in rural Appalachia, and with Afro-descendent traditional communities in Northeast Brazil.

Edgar’s research centers individual lifetimes and past communities as lenses through which to examine wider ecological and social contexts. Edgar attempts to understand aspects of the lived-experience of past individuals through an osteobiographical approach when considering the diets, physical activity and subsistence practices of individuals at snapshots in time. Edgar’s research is situated on the cusp of Spanish colonization near what would become Mexico City. 

My primary research interests include climate change perceptions and adaptation, management of common-pool resources, and policy and practice related to conservation and sustainability. Along with colleagues at several U.S. and international institutions, I have an NSF-funded Dynamics of Integrated Socio-environmental Systems (DISES) project that is examining linkages between climate change, land management, landscape, and policy to understand how to sustain small-scale pastoral systems in a changing world.