Hunt Lab 2024: Dr. Hunt (right) with doctoral students Lisa Vebber (left), Melanie Jones (second from left), Katie Bernhard (middle), and Ryan Naylor (second from right) at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Starting in July 2019, I began an exciting collaboration as a Fulbright Scholar with host institution the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador to explore ways that tourism can be better leveraged to preserve that “little world unto itself.” These collaborations led to a grant from the NSF Cultural Anthropology Program (Award #2020555, PI Hunt, $283, 344) for a project entitled Migrant worldviews and emergent ecological knowledge. This ethnographic project involves cultural consensus analyses related to environmental knowledge, cultural identities, and quality of life in the ethnically diverse communities of the Galápagos Islands. A Fellowship in Sustainability Research from the Charles Darwin Foundation continues to explore the ways that tourism and imported cultural worldviews affect the implementation of conservation, development, climate, and tourism policies in the Galapagos National Park and the archipelago’s human communities.
I am also involved as senior personnel on two NSF grants related to training graduate students. An NRT-INFEWS Landscape-U, Impactful partnerships among graduate students and managers for regenerative landscape design grant (Award #1828822, PI Erica Smithwick, $3,000,000) established the Landscape-U transdisciplinary training program at Penn State. This program is closely linked to the dual doctoral degree program in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment (HDNRE), which in 2023 became the Dual-title Graduate Degree Program in Transdisciplinary Research on Environment and Society (TREES). An IGE: Stakeholder-Driven Sustainable Development Experiences for Enhancing STEM Graduate Education grant (Award #2105726, PIs Rachel Brennan and Meng Wang, $458, 240) provides graduate students with the opportunity to carry out sustainability science research in collaboration with international partners.
I also serve as PI on four NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants. Landscape-U NRT Fellow Ryan Naylor has received support from the NSF Arctic Social Sciences Program for his project Livelihoods and Sovereignty in Coastal Alaska Communities (Award #2134843, PI Hunt, $63, 276). This ethnographic field research project ethnographically analyzes the influence of tourism on sovereignty and traditional livelihoods in three coastal communities in southeast Alaska. Landscape-U NRT Fellow Katie Bernhard has received support from NSF’s Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences (DRMS) Program for her project A Transdisciplinary, Comparative Analysis of Links Between Individual and Household Decision-making, Negotiation of Livelihood Risk, & Natural Resource Management Conflicts (Award 2343837, PI Hunt, $29,960). This mixed methods project is being carried out in communities around Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.
Additionally, Landscape-U NRT Fellow Lisa Vebber received word in April 2024 that the NSF Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences (DRMS) Program intends to support her project Influence of Moral Engagement on Decision-Making, Management, and Risk to Wildlife in Botswanan Protected Areas (PI Hunt, Award# pending, $30,000). This research will take place in and around Chobe National Park in Botswana. Finally, in May 2024, Landscape-U NRT Fellow Melanie Jones also received word that the NSF Cultural Anthropology intends to fund her proposal Conservation, Culture, and Common Pool Resources: Governing Tourism in the Galapagos (PI Hunt, Award# pending, $40,075). That ethnographic study will employ common-pool resource theory to the management of visitors in and around the Galápagos National Park.