Associate Professor, Natural Resources
About
Professor Hardin Co-Coordinated the STEM Africa Initiative for the African Studies Center from September 2015 to September 2017, and is working with that group and its colleagues on the continent and in African science diasporas to edit a volume entitled "Sustaining African Science Partnerships" in the "African Perspectives" series at the University of Michigan Press. Her areas of interest and study include human/wildlife interactions, and environmental justice issues in Africa, especially the western Congo basin. Recent projects also focus on the increasingly intertwined practices of health, environmental management, including sites in Gabon, South Africa, Kenya. In 2013-14 she advised a student team studying environmental justice cases within the U.S., and connecting them to the international Environmental Justice Atlas. She also founded and coordinates the SEAS Environmental Justice Certificate Program for studentss across campus studying communities who are either negatively impacted by environmental harms, or experiencing inequality of access to environmental goods and ecosystem services. In 2014-15 she worked with Erb Institute's Terry Nelidov and a student team assessing groundwater and surface water resources across the African continent, and advising GETF and Coca Cola about water related investment in Africa. She supervises Masters and Doctoral research on health and water quality with close colleagues in Public Health, and Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her forthcoming book Making Concessions conceptualizes African environmental governance through institutions of resource distribution, rivalry and alliance that have both predated and postdated formal colonialism, shaping territorial transactions, corporate social responsibility, conservation and philanthropy on that continent. Her book with Kamari Clarke, Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge, explores the discipline of anthropology as a set of skills and tools for social change in sectors as different as business, biological conservation, conflict resolution, and biomedical care. For more mobilization of academic study for work in the world check out her student driven podcast, It's Hot in Here.
