Application Essay For Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

817 Words4 Pages

As an undergraduate student I became fascinated with a number of academic specialties that allowed me to access the diverse world around me. My intellectual curiosity and varied interests in themes of gender, culture, social justice and environmental change set me on a wide trajectory of careers in academia, private, nonprofit, and government agencies. My first position as an undergraduate was with the World Wildlife Fund, preserving coastal forests in Kenya. After graduation, I was employed to work as a biological technician for a private environmental group collecting data on the rapidly decreasing Myotis, (bat) populations in the Eastern United States. From these positions I began to learn about the intricate politics of environmental protection …show more content…

I also continued to study environmental politics and was employed as a researcher to examine the responses of different Southwestern U.S cities to the catastrophic droughts of 2014-2015. I then worked with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Birds and Habitat Program to conduct planning and outreach during the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. As a graduate student and activist, I honed my literary voice with the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Barbara Brower, who perceives the creative form of writing to be as important as its intellectual content and encouraged me to write expressively. I have published academic book reviews on climate change and social theory and intend to publish portions of my master’s thesis on indigenous and farmer water conflict in the Klamath River Basin. For this project I observed tumultuous negotiations over water allocations and conducted interviews with key figures in resource management in the Klamath River Basin. I have established close relationships with my participants and my research has been shaped my own personal experiences and empathy with the basin’s …show more content…

In my writing and research I seek to understand who is empowered to make decisions over resources and why. Addressing this question demands a dissection of the geometries of power, the context of history and the dynamics of race, class, and gender. As a geographer, my work emphasizes the context of place for understanding political relationships, such as landscape and regional history. I am also interested in the impacts of systems of oppression, global economics, and market capitalism, and am well versed in these topics as a result of my educational