In Common

This ‘Insight’ episode is from full episode 37, where Michael and Stefan interview Jessica Cockburn.

Jessica is a Lecturer in Environmental Science at Rhodes University in South Africa. Jessica identifies as a "pracademic" who often works with local partners to explore how actors across a variety of contexts interact to address sustainability challenges. Her work is highly collaborative. Among the groups she engages with is the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS): https://pecs-science.org/.

https://www.ru.ac.za/environmentalscience/staff/staffacademic/jessicacockburn/

In this clip, Jessica’s explains why she draws a critical realism approach, and how that is positioned between positivist and constructivist paradigms.

Jessica's personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/jesscockburn/home

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jess_cockburn

This insight episode is taken from episode 46, where Michael spoke with Jon Parker. John is a sociologist of science and a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) within its division of social and economic sciences.

John’s website and google scholar pages:

http://john-parker-wg6d.squarespace.com/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=euuurksAAAAJ&hl=en

In this episode we all spoke with Frank van Laerhoven, a professor at Utrecht University and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of the Commons, a new partner of the In Common podcast. We talked to Frank about his time working for the Food and Agriculture Organization and his transition to academia. Frank discussed his concerns about both professional arenas and the gap between them. Are we really making a difference, and if not, how does this relate to the incentives that so many commons scholars study and also face? We asked Frank about his leadership of the journal and how some of these concerns can be addressed.

Frank's website: https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/FSJvanLaerhoven

International Journal of the Commons: https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/

 

 

Thanks to all our guests and listeners, the Finding Sustainability Podcast has been, in our eyes, a large success. In order to provide a sustainable platform for the podcast going forward and to expand opportunities for new types of content, we will now become an official partner with the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and the International Journal of the Commons (IJC). The new name our podcast will be In Common.

https://incommonpodcast.org/

https://iasc-commons.org/

https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/

The In Common podcast will explore the connections between humans, their environment and each other through stories told by scholars and practitioners. In-depth interviews and methods webinars explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work on commons governance, social-ecological resilience, and sustainability.

The title of the podcast is meant to evoke several ideas related to the sharing of resources. First, it reflects the idea of holding resources “In common” as it relates to actions of “commoning”, a process contrary to commons enclosures that we see around the world. We hope the podcast provides a shared space for open-access conversations that can help build community. Second, it is meant to emphasize the need to see what we have “in common”, in spite of the barriers across the disciplines and perspectives that we must incorporate in order to sustainably manage shared resources.

Following the Finding Sustainability Podcast, In Common will continue to have full episodes of long-form interviews, and Insight episodes containing highlights of these longer episodes. Additionally, the podcast will contain a series of Future Earth’s Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) video webinars describing different methods to analyze human-environment interactions. This series is run by Mike Schoon from Arizona State University. Our Blog, run by Graham Epstein, explores similar content but is not interview based. The blog provides an alternative space for sharing academic ideas, and will utilize online polls and surveys with our listeners and followers to discuss topics.

 

If you are already subscribed to the Finding Sustainability Podcast on your podcast player, you will continue to stay subscribed to the In Common podcast. Video webinars can be viewed on our website or directly on some podcast mobile apps such as Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Pocket Casts.

This insight episode is taken from episode 42 where Courtney and Michael talk with Joseph Ament, an ecological economist at the University of Vermont. In the full episode we discuss Joe’s research on money, common money misconceptions, the role of money right now during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this insight episode, we highlight Joe’s thoughts on shifting value towards sustainability in our economy and changing the goal of the monetary system to resiliency. 

 

If you are interested to learn more about Joe’s work, here are a couple recent publications:

Paper by Joe on Ecological Monetary Theory: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/3/923

Article by Joe for Uneven Earth on the monetary system and the Green New Deal: http://unevenearth.org/2020/01/public-money-for-environmental-justice/

Finding Sustainability Podcast

@find_sust_pod

https://twitter.com/find_sust_pod

 

Environmental Social Science Network

https://essnetwork.net/

https://twitter.com/ESS_Network

@ESS_Network

This insight episode is taken from episode 039, where Michael and I talk with Raul Pacheco-Vega.

Raul is a professor in the Public Administration Division of the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, CIDE (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, CIDE, AC) based out of CIDE Region Centro in Aguascalientes, Mexico. In the full podcast (episode 039) we discussed his work on waste and waste pickers, wastewater, and bottled water as un-traditional commons. We also spoke about the importance of making care work and life support systems visible under the Covid pandemic. In this insight we highlight his thoughts on the value of ethnography as a methodology to understand those issues.

Raul's personal website:

http://www.raulpacheco.org/blog/

https://twitter.com/raulpacheco?lang=en

 

Finding Sustainability Podcast

@find_sust_pod

https://twitter.com/find_sust_pod

Environmental Social Science Network

https://essnetwork.net/

https://twitter.com/ESS_Network

@ESS_Network

In this episode Michael and Stefan spoke with Mike Schoon, an associate professor in Arizona State University's School of Sustainability. They began by discussing Mike's previous career as an engineer and his PhD dissertation work on transboundary parks in Southern Africa, which he conducted while he was a PhD student at Indiana University, where he and Michael met as advisees of Lin Ostrom. They also talked about Mike's work on wildlife management in Arizona and the role he has played in the research communities on the Commons, as the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of the Commons, and Resilience, where he also plays a significant leadership role.

In this episode Michael and Courtney spoke with Jacopo Baggio, an assistant professor at the School of of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida. Michael and Courtney spoke with Jacopo about his career path and his work examining the validity of Elinor Ostrom's design principles for long-lasting community-base resource management, as well as his more recent work exploring the role that cognitive diversity plays in the abilities of groups to produce shared public goods. A common theme throughout the conversation was the importance of adapting methods to research questions, rather than the other way 'round.   

 

Jacopo's website: https://sciences.ucf.edu/politics/person/jacopo-baggio/

 

References for Jacopo's papers on cognitive diversity: 

 

Baggio, J. A., Freeman, J., Coyle, T. R., Nguyen, T. T., Hancock, D., Elpers, K. E., ... & Pillow, D. (2019). The importance of cognitive diversity for sustaining the commons. Nature communications, 10(1), 1-11.

 

Freeman, J., Baggio, J. A., & Coyle, T. R. (2020). Social and general intelligence improves collective action in a common pool resource system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7712-7718.

In this episode Michael and Stefan spoke with Jessica Gephart, an assistant professor of environmental science at American University. Jessica's research focuses on the feedbacks between globalized food systems and the environment, with an emphasis on seafood systems. Jessica, Stefan and Michael spoke about work she has done in trying to improve our accounting of seafood trade flows in order to better understand just where our seafood is going to and coming from, and why this is important to understand from an environmental sustainability perspective. They also talked about more recent work that Jessica has been doing to examine the impacts of the COVID pandemic on the seafood sector, and her professional identity as an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on applied social-ecological challenges.

Jessica's website: http://www.jessicagephart.com/

Paper from PNAS that is discussed:

Gephart, Jessica A., Halley E. Froehlich, and Trevor A. Branch. 2019. “Opinion: To Create Sustainable Seafood Industries, the United States Needs a Better Accounting of Imports and Exports.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116 (19): 9142–46. 

Footnote: We want to highlight a correction to the following statistics from what is stated in the interview. 90% of aquaculture production is produced by 10 countries, while 45 species make up 90% of aquaculture production.

 

This insight episode is taken from full episode 036 of the podcast with Liana Chua.

Liana is a social anthropologist at Brunel University London with long-term ethnographic interests in Borneo, ethnic politics, development, more-than-human landscapes, visuality, and materiality. Her current research revolves around the social, political, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of the global nexus of orangutan conservation.

She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, her MPhil in Social Anthropological Analysis from the University of Cambridge, and her BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford.

Liana’s university page:

https://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/liana-chua

Liana’s Twitter:

https://twitter.com/liana_chua?lang=en

 

Finding Sustainability Podcast

@find_sust_pod

https://twitter.com/find_sust_pod

Environmental Social Science Network

https://essnetwork.net/

https://twitter.com/ESS_Network

@ESS_Network