Congratulations to the New Dr. Shelton

Congratulations to Clare Shelton who has successfully defended her Doctoral thesis titled, "Adaptive Capacity, social capital and the Fijian Vanua: Understanding household and community capacity for adaptive responses to climate change environmental change in a Fijian village."

Dr. Shelton is currently working as a Senior Research Associate in the School of International Development and as the INOGOV Network Manager in the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, both at University of East Anglia. 

Villeda receives FLAS Fellowship to study Bahasa

First-year Masters student, Karen Villeda, is the recipient of two Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) awards to learn Bahasa Indonesia and study Southeast Asia area studies. Supported by the Henry M. Jackson School of International Affair's Southeast Asia Center, Karen will participate in an intensive two-month summer language immersion program through the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following this summer program, Karen will continue her Indonesian studies through a year-long FLAS Fellowship. These fellowships will complement her thesis research on skipack tuna in Ambon, Indonesia allowing her to assess the flow and value of skipjack in the local food market. 

Zhao receives FLAS Fellowship to study Swahili

Thanks to an exciting learning opportunity from the Henry M. Jackson School of International Affair's Center for Global Studies, Lily Zhao, a first-year master’s student in the Marina Lab, will continue her study of Swahili. She received a Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) award to participate in an intensive summer language immersion program in Tanzania. Lily will use these language skills later in the summer, when tracing the flow of octopus and trade benefits across East African national boundaries. This project will be a collaboration between local partners, the SMEA Marina Lab, and researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Special guest lecture: Professor Ussif Rashid Sumaila

This coming week MARINA Lab and the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs will host a special guest lecture from Professor Ussif Rashid Sumaila, who will speak on his cutting-edge bioeconomic research around the future of high seas management.

Professor Sumaila's talk is titled "Effective high seas management is necessary for the sustainability of the global ocean," but Professor Allison notes that, "behind this innocuous title is a bold proposition to make the entire ocean beyond areas of national jurisdiction a giant marine protected area, closed to fisheries, and potentially to other economic activities too (such as deep-sea hydrothermal vent mining)."  He adds that, "The original economic proposition has been enlarged to consider the effects of such closure on climate resilience of the oceans and nutrition security of coastal and island nations." 

Dr. Sumaila is Professor and Director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from Bergen University, Norway, and holds a B.Sc. with honors from Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria. Dr. Sumaila is deeply interested in how economics, through integration with ecology and other disciplines, can be used to help ensure that ocean resources are sustainably managed for the benefit of both current and future generations. He specializes in bioeconomics, marine ecosystem valuation and the analysis of global issues such as fisheries subsidies, IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing and the economics of high and deep seas fisheries. Sumaila has experience working in fisheries and natural resource projects in Norway, Canada and the North Atlantic region, Namibia and the Southern African region, Ghana and the West African region and Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

Dr. Sumaila has earned many prestigious awards in the course of his career including the just announced 2017 Excellence in Science Award by the Peter Benchley Ocean Award.

Second-year Hannah Bassett on fieldwork, language and decolonization

As a Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) Fellow, second-year Hannah Bassett is currently in the Philippines where she is doing fieldwork for her thesis on Philippine dive fisheries and continuing her Tagalog and Filipino culture studies. In a blog piece posted today, Hannah shares some of her poignant experiences in the learning process and breaks down the often overlooked role that language can play in either continuing colonialism or, instead, working toward decolonization.

Published in the SMEA blog, "Currents: Navigating society & sea," which Hannah founded and leads as Editor-In-Chief, the full post can be read here.