When: December 5, 2024 | 6-7 pm
Where: Forest Sciences Centre Rm 1001 and Online (via Zoom)
This event is open to the public, focusing on broader themes in Dr. Colfer’s work, including gender, inequality, and colonialism. It will cover her ethnographic research and experiences working in forestry across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, along with reflections on colonial impacts and gender issues within forestry and conservation framed in the context of her own positionality.
About Carol Colfer
Colfer received a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, in Cultural Anthropology (1974) and a second masters (of International Public Health) from the University of Hawaii in 1980. She has worked in a variety of institutions, from universities and research organizations, to NGOs, to consultancies, with many other disciplines (education, agriculture, engineering, health, environment, conservation, and, most consistently, forestry.
Geographically, she has undertaken ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the rural US. Since 1994, she has worked for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), focused on people in forests, specifically criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, health and forests, gender, landscape mosaics, adaptive collaborative management, and governance. Her work at CIFOR has mostly been comparative in nature, spanning the Asian, African and Latin American Tropics. Since 2009 she has also been a visiting fellow and scholar at Cornell University. She is currently exploring her own background (1955-2025), identifying and exploring cases of inequity and colonialism in the various contexts where she has worked.