UCL Anthropology

PhD Researcher 2006-2010

E-mail: s.haines

ucl.ac.uk

Department of Anthropology - Human Ecology Research Group

MSc Anthropology and Ecology of Development
University College London 2006

BSc (Hons) Anthropology
University College London 2004

PhD Working Title
Land, citizenship and development in southern Belize

My fieldwork in Belize (2006-8) involved explorations of resource use, political participation and development projects in three rural villages. I worked in Mopan, Q'eqchi' and Mestizo communities, researching the ways in which land and environments constitute both meaning and resource in a context of dynamic ecological and political relations. My research included case studies of border settlements, community forestry initiatives, highway upgrades and women's groups.

With indigenous land claims reaching the courts, and proposals on the table for a new road to join the Pan-American Highway across the contested international border with Guatemala, now seems an important time to explore these interactions and impacts. Women's groups, farmers' co-operatives and village communities are just some of the organizations attempting to engage with these decisions and actions; their varied goals, strategies and networks reflect the multivocality of the politics of participation and sustainability. I hope to illuminate some of the patterns and processes that have led to failures in development projects in the region, and to question assumptions and dichotomies that pit traditional against modern, global against local, Maya against non-Maya, individual against community, and mythical land against legal property. I attempt to mesh interpretive approaches to environmental engagement with political-economic awareness, in order to better understand the relationships between relevant ecological, social, economic and political factors.

Current research interests:

Environment and political economy; sustainability and participatory development; infrastructure development; environmental imaginaries; resource use and meanings; interface of social anthropology and human ecology; political anthropology; concepts and narratives of spaces, places and frontiers; critical cartography; indigenous and land rights movements.

Supervisors:

Dr Barrie Sharpe
Prof Nanneke Redclift

Funding

UK Economic and Social Research Council 2005-2010

Parkes Foundation fieldwork grant 2006

Conference papers:

'Ambivalent frontiers: spatial and political imaginaries in southern Belize'. Presented at Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) Annual Conference - Anthropological and Archaeological Imaginations: Past, Present and Future, 6th-9th April 2009, Bristol University, UK.

'Resources, rights and livelihoods: an overview of political, social, ecological and economic situations as they relate to agriculture in Toledo, Belize.' Presented at Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation Symposium - Banking on Biodiversity: The Ecological and Socio-Economic Dimensions of Sustainable Agriculture, 28th Oct 2006, Antioch New England Graduate School, USA.

Seminars organized:

Co-chair of Latin America Workshop (UCL/LSE) April-June 2009.

Awards and prizes:

University College London, Dept of Anthropology: Daryll Forde Prize 2004.

Royal Anthropological Institute: Arthur Maurice Hocart Prize 2004, for essay 'Landscapes of terror and denial in the Israel/Palestine conflict'.