Leadership and representation
We sit on national or local committees and support practical action and impact. For example:
- Sophie – Quebec Chair in Social Issues in Conservation.
- Rehema – Chair of Scotland’s United Nations University Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development.
- Birgit – Calakmul Biosphere Reserve Steering Committee.
We all also sit on departmental, institutional and other regional committees.
Mentoring and supervision
We mentor and nurture early career academics, especially women, supporting research assistants and co-supervising PhD students, then supporting them with postdoctoral or action-oriented opportunities when possible (e.g. Lou Lecuyer from co-supervised PhD Sherbrooke to postdoc at ECOSUR then to an NGO; Sofia Mardero from PhD at ECOSUR Mexico to postdoc at St Andrews then in Sherbrooke; Grecia Casanova from RA to co-supervised PhD; Reynaldo Chi Aguilar from RA to co-supervised PhD). In the past, Sophie and Birgit have co-supervised other students, including Antalia Gonzalez Abram.
Teaching
Whilst each of us has an individual teaching and learning portfolio, we also work together across the Masters programme, in PhD supervision and in exploring how to support learning for sustainability across sectors and scales.
Impacts
There are different ways of understanding impact from academic activities. We follow the framework of Edwards and Meagher (2020) which highlights five types of impact.
- Conceptual impact: we have made new contributions to knowledge, for example, around biodiversity conflicts and knowledge integration.
- Capacitive impact: we support students, early career researchers and young people in local communities and endeavour to learn with and from reserve managers and others.
- Instrumental impact: our research has influenced local policy and and enabled projects and groups to gain additional funding to further pursue their activities.
- Connective impact: we have connected people together on the ground, through international collaborations and across academic networks.
- Culture/attitudes towards knowledge: we have explored both integration of Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge and the ontological incompatibilities of different knowledge forms.