Academic Interests
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Environmental Anthropology
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Oceans and Climate Change
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Local and Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems
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Commodities, Consumption, and Food
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Southeast Asia and the Pacific
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Conservation and Common Pool Resources
Background
Florence Durney is an cultural anthropologist whose broad-scale research interests center on the relationships of human societies and their environments. The majority of her work has focused on humans and the marine environment, and the ways in which that relationship is differentially understood and put in practice around harvest and management, with a regional focus in Southeast Asia. As a postdoc with the ERC funded Whales of Power lab, her current project focuses on the last active community of traditional marine hunters and whalers in eastern Indonesia, and their experiences negotiating cosmology, hunting, and identity in a time of large-scale social and environmental change.
Before joining her team at IKOS, Durney completed a PhD at University of Arizona in 2019, where she also lectured in anthropology. She has also worked as a contracted researcher and research assistant on projects across the social and natural sciences including at the University of Arizona, the American Museum of Natural History, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and beyond.
Awards
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Fulbright Fellow 2016-2017
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P.E.O. Scholar 2017-2018
Selected Publications
Durney, Florence. 2020. Appropriate Targets: Global patterns in interactions and conflicts around cetaceans, management, and traditional marine hunting communities. Environment and Society (7).
Lansing, J. Stephen and Florence Durney. 2013. Irrigation Societies. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds. Elsevier. Available Online.
Education
- Ph.D. - University of Arizona 2019
- M.A. - University of Arizona 2014
- B.A. - Barnard College, Columbia University 2009