Jesse Ribot

Jesse Ribot is a social scientist (drawing on Geography/Sociology/Anthropology) focused on the social causes of climate-related vulnerability, and on rights, recourse and representation in struggles over natural resource access. His fieldwork is mostly in West Africa with comparative case studies around the world. He currently teaches environmental politics in the School of International Service at American University. He taught in the Departments of Geography, Anthropology and Natural Resources and Environmental Science at University of Illinois 2008 to 2018. Before 2008, he was a senior associate of the World Resources Institute, and taught in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He was a fellow at: the Department of Politics of The New School for Social Research; Agrarian Studies at Yale University; the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology; Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars; Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies; Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences; and was a 2018-19 Guggenheim Fellow affiliated with the Wagner School at NYU and CUNY Graduate Center Anthropology Program. Ribot recounts his findings through books, articles, policy briefs, editorials, films, sculpture and teaching.