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SIPA Faculty
Paige West
Milbank, Room 411
Associate Professor, Anthropology, Barnard College
Phone: 212-854-5933
cw2031@columbia.edu
http://bc.barnard.edu/~pwest/
Biography:
Paige West's research interests include the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the aesthetics, poetics, and materiality of human social relations with nature, and the critical analysis of the creation of commodities and practices of consumption. Her current research is a study of the meanings and values attributed to plants and animals in Papua New Guinea with a focus on how these objects articulate with economic needs and social change.
West has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Australia, Germany, England, and the United States. She received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology and Environment Junior Scholar award in 2002; the American Association of University Women Junior Faculty Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship in 2004; the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Fellowship in 2006; and she was named a Fellow by the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania in 2007. She is the president of the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association.
In addition to her academic work, West is the co-founder of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research (PNG IBR) a small NGO dedicated to building the academic capacity for research in Papua New Guinea among Papua New Guineans. She is currently on its board of directors. West is also the staff anthropologist for the NGO Ailan Awareness (AA), a marine-conservation NGO located in Kavieng, Papua New Guinea, and co-founder of the Ranguva Solwara Skul, a school dedicated to indigenous knowledge and education in Kavieng, PNG.
West’s most recent books are From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Images, Labor, and Coffee from Papua New Guinea and Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. She is the editor of four books, including Virtualism, Governance, and Practice, published in 2010 by Berghahn Books.
In 2008, she founded the journal Environment and Society: Advances in Research, published by Berghahn Books.
West received her MA in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Georgia in 1994 and her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University in 2000.
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