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Amity Doolittle's
research focuses on how control over and access to natural
resources is defined, negotiated and contested by local
communities and national governments. Her approach is
interdisciplinary, combining perspectives from anthropology,
political science, environmental history and political
ecology to explore property relations and conflicts
over resources use. Her research has taken her to Malaysian
Borneo where she studied British colonial law and native
customary land rights in order to better understand
contemporary land use conflicts in Malaysia. In Honduras
she has worked with rural mountain communities who live
inside the buffer zone of a national park growing coffee.
In her work there she is trying to negotiate between
conservationists and local farmers regarding the future
protection of biodiversity in the Honduran cloud forest
and the continued cultivation of coffee for local livelihoods.
She is currently working on an analysis of newspaper
coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to see
how race and class are defined, talked about and reproduced
in print media. The goal of this work is to better understand
how “everyday racism” is written about and
characterized in American society.
With colleagues at Yale she is conducting
research on the socio-economic costs and benefits of
oil palm plantations in Indonesia, with specific emphasis
on the loss of access to native lands and the shift
for local peoples from subsistence based livelihoods
to plantations workers. In Panama and Singapore she
and Yale colleagues, in collaboration with the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute, are building an Environmental
Leadership and Training Initiative that aims to enhance
environmental conservation and leadership capacity in
the tropics through short courses, workshops and field
courses that provide cutting edge learning and networking
opportunities.
The greatest real world outcome
of her academic work thus far is that her book on land
rights in Malaysia was used to set legal precedence
in Sabah High Court, winning customary land rights for
native people who had been evicted from their traditional
lands.
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