The positionality of a researcher is influenced by their background, including their values, beliefs, and personal experiences with a topic. This positionality in turn shapes what a researcher chooses to investigate, the approach and methods they select, their relationship to the people involved in the research, and their interpretation or framing of the research (Finlay 2002; Mauthner & Doucet 2003; Khagram et al. 2010).
Growing up next door to the last functioning dairy farm in the suburbs of Chicago gave me a deep appreciation for the value of public participation in conservation. The farm was repeatedly threatened by developers throughout my childhood, leading my parents to help form the organization Citizens Organized for Wagner’s Farm (C.O.W.S.). After years of meetings, protests, poetry contests, and several embarrassing stints as our mascot – Bart the Bull – I was thrilled to be part of the celebration when the Park District purchased the farm for conversion to an interactive museum on local farming history. This experience taught me the important lesson that tangible personal and community gains must be present if we want to catalyze public engagement and commitment to conservation. Without a doubt, this early passion for the protection of a natural and cultural resource has shaped my current work.
Throughout my career in conservation, I have found the greatest personal and professional satisfaction working at the intersection of research and practice. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I worked with the Forestry Extension office on several projects that opened my eyes to the difficulty we face in reconciling ecological and economic objectives in U.S. conservation. This motivated me to serve as an environmental education volunteer with the Peace Corps, where I could learn how other cultures perceive and address conservation challenges. My work in Kolda, one of the least developed regions in Senegal, revealed the power of working on community-identified problems with joint ecological and economic benefits – in this case, community gardens that used permaculture techniques to improve household food security and soil health, and to increase income generation. These experiences inspired a career dedicated to merging the goals of conservation and development in the U.S. and abroad.
As a transdisciplinary conservation scientist, I do not perceive myself as an outside observer of some process, but rather as an integrated member of a research team composed of scientists and non-scientists seeking to understand and solve social-ecological problems. My epistemological approach to this type of research is thus understandably eclectic. On the one hand, I subscribe to a realist philosophy that says there is an objective world out there that is separate from me. I believe it is the same physical entity for all of us, and we can use empirical observations and measurements to produce new knowledge about the world to improve our management of the environment. On the other hand, I am also a constructivist that believes social-ecological systems exist as cognitive constructs in the minds of the people living in them. I believe we must pursue a more nuanced understanding of the internal states (i.e., attitudes, values, and beliefs) of people in order to design environmental management strategies that fit particular socio-cultural contexts. I am a critical realist in the sense that I believe we cannot fully know any one “truth”, but only approximate truth under different contexts through the collection and analysis of data, both qualitative and quantitative.
My objective as a conservation scientist is to improve the equitable and sustainable management of natural resources by studying the process of collaborative conservation. I believe that collaborative decision-making – when diverse groups of people work and learn together on an issue – can help us overcome significant social and cultural barriers in conservation by promoting trust and respect among people with sometimes very different worldviews. A guiding principle in my research is to do relevant and practical research that improves our ability to build effective teams that can support conservation science and practice. The lengthy time I spent exploring and learning about the people and the environment of the Guassa area helped ensure my dissertation work fit the needs of this area. For example, one local farmer told me, “no one has asked us what we want them to research before. We have many ideas – we know what needs to be researched.” Another farmer commented that he remembered me because “…you pay us when we participate. Other scientists don’t pay us when they ask us questions.” Because of my ethic of collaboration, I work to treat my partners with respect, generosity, and kindness.
My positionality makes me particularly sensitive to issues of power within conservation teams, and I work to ensure that different perspectives are valued and respected in collaborative processes – even when this contradicts my own research objectives. For example, the second modeling workshop of my dissertation started off with low motivation and low participation among local farmers. It emerged that there was another meeting organized at the same time as our workshop, and they were expected to attend both. I negotiated with them to reduce our workshop to a single day so that they could fulfill both obligations at least partially. This reduced the time I had to present and discuss the project's agent-based model with them, but it further strengthened our ability to communicate when things weren’t working for certain members of the team. I believe this kind of transparency and power sharing is essential to effective collaborative conservation.
Growing up next door to the last functioning dairy farm in the suburbs of Chicago gave me a deep appreciation for the value of public participation in conservation. The farm was repeatedly threatened by developers throughout my childhood, leading my parents to help form the organization Citizens Organized for Wagner’s Farm (C.O.W.S.). After years of meetings, protests, poetry contests, and several embarrassing stints as our mascot – Bart the Bull – I was thrilled to be part of the celebration when the Park District purchased the farm for conversion to an interactive museum on local farming history. This experience taught me the important lesson that tangible personal and community gains must be present if we want to catalyze public engagement and commitment to conservation. Without a doubt, this early passion for the protection of a natural and cultural resource has shaped my current work.
Throughout my career in conservation, I have found the greatest personal and professional satisfaction working at the intersection of research and practice. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I worked with the Forestry Extension office on several projects that opened my eyes to the difficulty we face in reconciling ecological and economic objectives in U.S. conservation. This motivated me to serve as an environmental education volunteer with the Peace Corps, where I could learn how other cultures perceive and address conservation challenges. My work in Kolda, one of the least developed regions in Senegal, revealed the power of working on community-identified problems with joint ecological and economic benefits – in this case, community gardens that used permaculture techniques to improve household food security and soil health, and to increase income generation. These experiences inspired a career dedicated to merging the goals of conservation and development in the U.S. and abroad.
As a transdisciplinary conservation scientist, I do not perceive myself as an outside observer of some process, but rather as an integrated member of a research team composed of scientists and non-scientists seeking to understand and solve social-ecological problems. My epistemological approach to this type of research is thus understandably eclectic. On the one hand, I subscribe to a realist philosophy that says there is an objective world out there that is separate from me. I believe it is the same physical entity for all of us, and we can use empirical observations and measurements to produce new knowledge about the world to improve our management of the environment. On the other hand, I am also a constructivist that believes social-ecological systems exist as cognitive constructs in the minds of the people living in them. I believe we must pursue a more nuanced understanding of the internal states (i.e., attitudes, values, and beliefs) of people in order to design environmental management strategies that fit particular socio-cultural contexts. I am a critical realist in the sense that I believe we cannot fully know any one “truth”, but only approximate truth under different contexts through the collection and analysis of data, both qualitative and quantitative.
My objective as a conservation scientist is to improve the equitable and sustainable management of natural resources by studying the process of collaborative conservation. I believe that collaborative decision-making – when diverse groups of people work and learn together on an issue – can help us overcome significant social and cultural barriers in conservation by promoting trust and respect among people with sometimes very different worldviews. A guiding principle in my research is to do relevant and practical research that improves our ability to build effective teams that can support conservation science and practice. The lengthy time I spent exploring and learning about the people and the environment of the Guassa area helped ensure my dissertation work fit the needs of this area. For example, one local farmer told me, “no one has asked us what we want them to research before. We have many ideas – we know what needs to be researched.” Another farmer commented that he remembered me because “…you pay us when we participate. Other scientists don’t pay us when they ask us questions.” Because of my ethic of collaboration, I work to treat my partners with respect, generosity, and kindness.
My positionality makes me particularly sensitive to issues of power within conservation teams, and I work to ensure that different perspectives are valued and respected in collaborative processes – even when this contradicts my own research objectives. For example, the second modeling workshop of my dissertation started off with low motivation and low participation among local farmers. It emerged that there was another meeting organized at the same time as our workshop, and they were expected to attend both. I negotiated with them to reduce our workshop to a single day so that they could fulfill both obligations at least partially. This reduced the time I had to present and discuss the project's agent-based model with them, but it further strengthened our ability to communicate when things weren’t working for certain members of the team. I believe this kind of transparency and power sharing is essential to effective collaborative conservation.