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Aerial view of water in a delta
Women of impact
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Dr Rebecca Elmhirst - social justice in a changing environment

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst’s interest in the ways communities respond to negative and socially uneven impacts of environmental change began when she was introduced to feminist geography as a Masters Student at the University of British Columbia in Canada. For her PhD, she spent a year doing ethnographic fieldwork and living with a family of resettled ‘forest squatters’ in what was at that time an inaccessible and very poor part of Lampung, Indonesia.

Learning from the women and men of this poor and marginalised community launched two decades of research and teaching experience on struggles over environmental governance, migration and social justice in the global South. Most of her work is in partnership with scholar-activists in Southeast Asia, with whom she has developed various programmes of research and teaching. These include current projects on the links between migrant remittances, livelihoods and forest governance in Indonesia, and on living with floods in peri-urban contexts in Southeast Asia.

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst

I take inspiration from the friendship-based collaborative networks that I have had the privilege of being part of, working with and learning from remarkable women and men from diverse corners of Southeast Asia. My work with them has provided me with the kind of transformational experience that I hope to encourage students at Brighton to have as part of their studies.

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst

The work that Rebecca and her research partners are undertaking has helped develop and advance ‘feminist political ecology’, an approach to research and practice that empowers and promotes social and ecological transformation for women and other marginalised groups. This has taken shape in a number of different projects: findings from a recent study of the impacts of large scale investments in oil palm on indigenous women in Indonesia have been used by lobby groups to introduce better social justice mechanisms in the oil palm commodity chain. She is currently co-producing a book with women and men working in technical organisations on the challenges of integrating transformative feminist political ecology into mainstream environment and development work.

Her research collaborations frequently take her back to Indonesia and Thailand, and these visits provide a very special opportunity to think through current academic and policy debates with communities at the most challenging forefront of global environmental change.

Oil palm workers (Photo by Icaro Cooke Vieira, CIFOR)

Oil palm workers (Photo by Icaro Cooke Vieira, CIFOR)

Becky has been a great joy to work with all these years! She truly carries a collaborative spirit, and I can never count the times she’s enabled opportunities for us ‘to reflect together’ in a gentle, friendly and wonderfully fun way. I’ve become a better feminist because of our friendship and collaboration. Her work on the politics of environment that disfavour women and other groups in my region of Southeast Asia has been hugely illuminating.

Babette P. Resurrección, Senior Research Fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute-Asia Centre

Inspiring others

Rebecca is currently a co-researcher on a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie International Training Network of European universities, which seeks to use feminist political ecology to address urgent environmental issues at the European and global level. The network also provides a unique opportunity for a new generation of emerging scholars in Europe to network and learn with colleagues in the Global South.

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