Research

Political Ecology

MAIN RESEARCH AIM:

Critical examination of the methods, politics, and challenges of restricting or allowing for the flourishing and free movement of animals across borders and between cultures.

OVERVIEW:

Jenny's research in political ecology focuses on the contested politics of wildlife and environmental management. She studies the many factors that produce local support for or resistance to the state management of protected areas and highly mobile (endangered or invasive) species. She specifically investigates the myriad, site-specific reasons for land use disputes and human-animal conflicts.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, critical theory, mapping, and qualitative mixed methods, she asks how and why particular species and environments are controversially known and sometimes violently managed by the state and other actors. Attending to multiple scales of analysis, drawing on insights from many disciplines, her research, teaching, and field work investigates how species and their habitats might be more equitably and sustainably managed using participatory, community-based approaches.

PrimarY research site: Delaware Bay, New Jersey, USA

In May and June, the Delaware Bay hosts one of the largest gatherings of shorebirds and other species in the world. Jenny has studied shorebird conservation efforts at closed beaches in New Jersey, as a participant observer and shorebird steward, from 2011 - present.

The DE Bay is the flagship site of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN), a network of over 100 conservation sites, which she focused on in her PhD.

Jenny is currently co-leading an archival research team with Dr. Eduardo Gallo Cajiao (Colorado State University) set to publish about the history and birth of WHSRN as an institution.

New Jersey's Delaware Bay is a 'more-than-human contact zone' (Isaacs & Otruba 2019) -- a multispecies intersection point or 'liminal space' where difference others meet and relations are uneven. Here in May and June, conservation officers and 'shorebird stewards' protect migratory threatened shorebirds from disturbance as they forage on horseshoe crab eggs. The birds utilize nine state-enforced, town-supported, scientifically-informed closure sites. These sites of conservation encounters and resistance served as Jenny's field research. Here she witnessed and documented the dynamics of multispecies conservation encounters; she served as a participant observer of wildlife management best practices, interviewed beach goers, scientists, and volunteers. Jenny began this project in 2011 as part of her Sustainability Studies Masters Program research, under Dr. Eric Wiener at Ramapo College and continued with it as her PhD at Rutgers. She completed her PhD dissertation "The 'bander's grip': A techno-political ecology of Western Atlantic shorebird conservation" at and graduated from Rutgers in May 2021, under the supervision of her Dissertation Committee Advisors: Richard Schroeder (Chair, Brandeis), Asher Ghertner (Co-Chair, Rutgers), Kevin St. Martin (Rutgers), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA). She has published numerous articles and chapters on this research. Read about what it's like to protect and capture shorebirds at these sites, sensitive to their de/postcolonial context, here.

Secondary research interests:

Inter-tribal, Intergovernmental Bison Management in Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. For example, supporting the inspiring work of the Buffalo Field Campaign.
Eradication, biosecurity, and the state: New Jersey planning and execution of Spotted Lanternfly, Black Bear, and White-Tailed Deer eradication / management programs (across Mid-Atlantic States)

ACTIVE PROJECTS:
1) SPOTTED LANTERNFLY:

Survey of public attitudes towards state-sponsored invasive Spotted Lanternfly eradication campaign; includes supervision of four student research / field assistants. Our team has conducted 400 surveys, interviews on campus, examining attitudes and behaviors toward lanternflies, specifically focusing on personal compliance with or resistance to state directives to kill invasive Spotted Lanternflies on sight. Data analyzed using Nvivo, with manuscript in production.

2) BISON:

“This is what decolonization looks like ?”: Examining tensions and challenges of Yellowstone bison co-stewardship arrangements between Native tribes, white settler activists, and state environmental managers. Research includes multiple ethnographic field research trips taken with Rutgers Undergraduates to Buffalo Field Campaign basecamp at Yellowstone National Park, Montana; expanded to include 8 additional students scheduled to be in residence at BFC summer 2024

Initiated interdisciplinary applied mapping collaboration between Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) staff, Rick Lathrop (Professor of Ecology and Evolution and Director of the Rutgers Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis), and a team of five Undergraduate students. Deliverable: ArcGIS database to organize and analyze twenty years of wildlife field observations collected by BFC staff and field patrol volunteers outside Yellowstone National Park.

Fields of Interest

Conservation ENVironmental Management

Political ecology: Including biogeography, stewardship, conservation network building to protect migratory species, across borders and cultures, movement ecology, biomobility & biosecurity environmental knowledge production & management, human-animal conflict, wildlife tracking & monitoring, globalization of conservation, sustainability, wilderness and wildness, wildlife forensics, citizen science. Cases of focus include the managment of shorebirds, bison, and spotted lanternfly.

Animal / More-than-human Geography

Examining sites, situations, and spatial aspects of human entanglements with other animals. Ethnographic case-based research using the lenses of more-than-human geography (Whatmore), multispecies studies and extinction studies (Kirksey, Haraway), critical animal studies, animal geography (Urbanik), animal ethics / animality / animalization, and biophilosophy, animal atmospheres, aerogeography, ocean studies, vertical / volumetric sovereignty

Environmental Humanities

Application of critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the environment: especially de/postcolonial theory, Indigenous & Latin American theories of decolonization, Feminist science studies / STS, environmental philosophy, ecocriticism, use of the media/narrative, spatial theory, new materialism, ecofeminism, nonrepresentational theory, actor-network theory, island and archipelagic studies, development studies, queer ecology, Buddhist ecology, emotion and affect / of field work