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About

Adrienne Johnson is a human geographer who earned a PhD from Clark University. Her dissertation looked at the political ecology and critical resource geographies of Ecuador’s palm oil industry with a specific focus on Afro-Ecuadorian, smallholder, and company participation in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification scheme. She received an MA in geography and a BA in international development studies and political science from York University, Canada. Before joining the Environmental Studies program at the University of San Francisco in 2018, Adrienne was a 2015-17 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada postdoctoral scholar at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University.

Adrienne specializes in critical approaches to environmental governance and extraction in both Ecuador and Indonesia, and teaches courses on nature-society relations, environmental justice, and gender & environment. She has published in World Development, Geoforum, Development and Change, Journal of Rural Studies, Earth System Governance and other journals. She is co-editor of a recent special issue on post/anti-colonial and feminist reflections on the methods and methodologies of natural resource industries fieldwork appearing in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. She is a an elected Board Member for the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) and a member of the ESG Taskforce on Planetary Justice.

palm oil; extraction; environmental governance; certification; political ecology

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