Fall 2016 and spring 2016 seminars: Ph.D.candidate, anthropology
Rachel Odhner is a second-year Ph.D. student in the anthropology department at Cornell University. Broadly speaking, she is interested in environmental anthropology, agricultural change and livelihoods, water resource use and management, human-environment relationships, and Latin America. Prior to beginning graduate school, she received her B.A. in cultural anthropology and Latin American studies at the University of Rochester. Experiences living and working in Ecuador and Nicaragua on projects related to food security and rural development left her with many questions about such interventions. These questions led her to graduate school. Her dissertation research explores changing agricultural and water management practices among smallholder farmers in Nicaragua, in the context of climate change adaptation interventions and plans for a major waterway infrastructure project. She will examine how both farmers and development actors negotiate knowledge, value, and notions of place amid a changing environment and sociopolitical landscape. As a Mellon Fellow, Odhner looks forward to further exploring a critical question that lies at the heart of her own research: how competing ontological assumptions about the meaning and significance of the natural world play out in processes of development.