Professor Paige West
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Pronouns: She/Her
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Professor, Anthropology, Barnard College
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Director of the Transdisciplinary Graduate Studies Laboratory,
Columbia Climate School -
Millbank 411
BIOGRAPHY:
Paige West joined the faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in 2001, the year after earning her Ph.D. in cultural and environmental anthropology. She holds The Claire Tow Professorship in Anthropology and serves as the Director of the Columbia University Climate School Transdisciplinary Research Lab. Dr. West has worked in Papua New Guinea since 1996 and has conducted over 100 months of field-based research in the country.
Dr. West’s broad scholarly interest is in the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood by Indigenous peoples and natural scientists, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption. Her current research is focused on sea level rise, managed retreat, and the question of how people forge new lives in the face of climatic change.
Dr. West is the author of three books and the editor of five more. She has also published numerous scholarly papers. In 2009 Dr. West founded the peer-review journal Environment and Society: Advances in Research and served as its editor for a decade. Dr. West’s most recent book, Dispossession and the Environment, won the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.
In 2002 Dr. West received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology and Environment Junior Scholar award, in 2004 she received both the American Association of University Women Junior Faculty Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship, in 2006 she received the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Fellowship, and in 2007 she was named a Fellow by the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania. In 2012 she became the Chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia. She has served as the chair of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania and is the past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In 2013 she delivered the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at Columbia University, an honor given to one faculty member a year. In 2016 she was named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Social Environmental Synthesis Center and an advisor to the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Science for Nature and People Initiative. In 2017 and 2018 Dr. West served as a Phi Beta Kappa distinguished national lecturer. Dr. West is also a Guggenheim Fellow.
Dr. West has delivered distinguished lectures across the United States and in England, Denmark, Australia, Norway, and Malaysia and has given over two hundred invited lectures since 1999.
In addition to her academic work, Dr. West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.
PUBLICATIONS
Selected Publications / Books
2016. Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
2015. Tropical Forests of Oceania: Anthropological Perspectives. Joshua Bell, Paige West and Colin Filer, eds. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
2012. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social Life of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.
2009 Virtualism, Governance, and Practice: Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation. James G. Carrier and Paige West, eds. New York: Berghahn Books.
2006. Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.
Selected Publications / Special Editions, Peer Reveiw Journals, as Editor
2021. Offshore Detention in the Pacific. JC Salyer, Steffen Dalsgard, and Paige West, eds. The Contemporary Pacific.32(2).
2018. From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities. Paige West, ed. Cultural Anthropology (Online & Open Access, in Hot Spots), September 22.
2010. Surroundings, Selves and Others: The Political Economy of Identity and the Environment. James G. Carrier and Paige West, eds. Landscape Research, 34 (2).
2006. Melanesian Mining Modernities. Paige West and Martha Macintyre, eds. The Contemporary Pacific, 18 (2).
Selected Publications / Journal Articles
Yin Zhang, Paige West**, et. al. (2023) “Protected Areas, Community Based Natural Resource Management Areas, and Indigenous and Locally Designed Management: An assessment of effectiveness” Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Vol. 48:559-588 (** coresponding author).
Aini, John, Paige West, Yolarnie Amepou, Michael Ladi Piskaut, Cornelius Gasot, Rachel S. James, Jason S. Roverts, Patrick Nason, and Anna Elyse Brachey. Under review. “Reimagining Conservation Practice: Indigenous Self Determination and Collaboration in Papua New Guinea. Oryx.
West, Paige, Et. Al. In review. Conservation and Governance. Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
West, Paige. 2021. “Reversing the question: Malinowskian Legacies and the Anthropology of Climate Change”, Economic Anthropology. 8(1):172-147.
West, Paige. 2020. “Becoming through the Mundane: Asylum Seekers and the Making of Selves in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea”. In, Offshore Detention in the Pacific. JC Salyer, Steffen Dalsgard, and Paige West, eds. The Contemporary Pacific. 32(2):468-476.
Salyer, JC, Steffen Dalsgaard, Paige West 2020. “It Is Not Because They Are Bad People”: Australia’s Refugee Resettlement in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. The Contemporary Pacific 32(2): 435-448.
West, Paige. 2020. “Translations, palimpsests, and politics: Environmental Anthropology Now”. Ethos: Journal of Anthropology. 85(1):118–123.
West, Paige. 2018. “Introduction” in From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities. In, Paige West (ed)., Cultural Anthropology (Hot Spots). September 22.
West, Paige. 2017. “Town and Place: Old Territory, New Difference”. Cultural Dynamics. 29(4) 322-332.
Sterling, E.J., et. al. 2017. (one of 15 co-authors) “Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales”, Nature Ecology, and Evolution. 1, 1798–1806 (2017).
West, Paige. 2017. “Dispossession.” In Theorizing the Contemporary”, June 28. Cultural Anthropology. (online only)
West, Paige. 2016. “An Anthropology for The Assemblage of the Now”, Anthropological Forum. 26 (4) 438-445.
West, Paige. 2015. “Anthropological Indeterminacy”. HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 5(1) 454–458.
Castree, Noel, et. al. 2014. (one of 23 co-authors) “Changing the Intellectual Climate”. Nature Climate Change 4, 763-768.
West, Paige. 2014. "Such A Site for Play, This Edge: Surfing, Tourism and Modernist Fantasy in Papua New Guinea”. The Contemporary Pacific 26 (2).
Ogden, Laura, Nik Heynen, Ulrich Oslender, Paige West, Karim-Aly Kassam, and Paul Robbins. 2013. “Place, Equity and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene”, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 11(7): 341-347.
West, Paige. 2012. “Globalization, Place, and Theory in Anthropology”. Anthropology Now. 4 (3): 97-108
Laurance, Bill, et. al. 2012. (one of 100 co-authors) “Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas”. Nature, 489, 290-294.
West, Paige. 2010. My Reply. (critical essay response to reviews of Conservation is Our Government Now). Pacific Studies 33 (1): 102 -120.
West, Paige. 2010. “Making the Market: Specialty Coffee, Generational Pitches, and Papua New Guinea”. Antipode. 42 (3) 690 – 718.
West, Paige and James G. Carrier. 2010.” Surroundings, Selves, and Others: The Political Economy of Environment and Identity”. Landscape Research. 34 (2) 157 – 170.
West, Paige. 2008. “Tourism as Science and Science as Tourism: Environment, Society, Self and Other in Papua New Guinea”. Current Anthropology. 49 (4):597-625.
Peterson, Richard, Paige West, Diane Russell and Peter Brosius. 2008. “Seeing (and Doing) Conservation Through a Cultural Lenses”. Environmental Management 45:5–18.
West, Paige, and Daniel Brockington. 2006. “Some Unexpected Consequences of Protected Areas: An Anthropological Perspective”. Conservation Biology 20 (3):609-616.
West, Paige, Daniel Brockington, and James Igoe. 2006. “Parks and Peoples: The Social Effects of Protected Areas”. Annual Review of Anthropology 20 (3):609-616.
West, Paige. 2006. “Environmental Conservation and Mining: Between Experience and Expectation in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea”. The Contemporary Pacific 18 (2):295-313.
West, Paige. 2005. “Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology”. American Anthropologist 107 (4):632-642.
West, Paige. 2005. “Holding the Story Forever: The Aesthetics of Ethnographic Labor”. Anthropological Forum 15 (3):267-275.
West, Paige, and James G. Carrier. 2004. “Getting Away from It All? Ecotourism and Authenticity” (with commentary and reply). Current Anthropology 45 (4):483-498.
West, Paige. 2003. “Knowing the Fight: The Politics of Conservation in Papua New Guinea”. Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 10 (2):38-45.
West, Paige. 2001. “Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry”. Social Analysis45 (2):55-77.
CONTACT
212-854-5933
NETWORK AFFILIATION(S)
Community-driven Co-productionEXPERTISE
environmental anthropology cultural anthropology political ecology social and ecological justiceFIELDS OF INTEREST
Conservation, Development, Coastal Resilience, Decolonial Practice, Co-Production of Knowledge, Indigenous Self-Determination, Papua New Guinea, Oceania
EDUCATION
Ph.D. Anthropology, Rutgers University (1997 – 2000)
M.Phil. Anthropology, Rutgers University (1995 – 1997)
M.A. Anthropology, The University of Georgia (1991 – 1994), Phi Kappa Phi
B.S. Sociology and Psychology, Wofford College (1987 – 1991) Magna Cum Laude, Sociology Department High Honors, Phi Beta Kappa
HONORS & AWARDS
2021 Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
2021 One of “50 people changing the world” by the Explorers Club.
2017-2018 Phi Beta Kappa national distinguished visiting scholar (one of fifteen nationally).
2017 Winner, Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award for Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
2016 Commencement Speaker, Wofford College.
2016 Distinguished Scholar-Lecturer for the NSF’s National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC).
2013 Delivered the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at Columbia University.
2010 Mack Lipkin Man and Nature Fellow by the American Museum of Natural History.
2009 Outstanding Mentorship Award, Columbia University Office of Multicultural Affairs
2009 University Lecturer for the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Spring 2009).
2006 Rockefeller Foundation Residency, Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy,
2004-2005 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.
2004-2005 American Association of University Women American Fellowship.
2002 American Anthropological Association, Anthropology and Environment Junior Scholar Award.