March 11, 2026 
University of Southern California

Paige West (Columbia University)

On March 11th, 9:30-11:00am, we will host a conversation with Paige West on the sustained joys and challenges of working with family. How do you work/collaborate/mobilize with people you love? What are the challenges and possibilities we face when thinking and doing are not severed from pre-existing responsibilities? How do science and knowledge take shape in this lively juncture?

Dr. Paige West is The Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Since the late 1990s, her research and teaching have focused on the relationships between Indigenous ecological knowledge, environmental conservation, and socio-political transformation in Oceania, particularly in Papua New Guinea, where she has conducted over 110 months of field-based research since 1997. Dr. West’s scholarship bridges the social and environmental sciences, exploring themes such as the intersections of conservation and development, Indigenous alternatives to externally imposed environmental agendas, the symbolic and material engagements with biodiversity, the commodification of ecological knowledge, and climate change. Her more recent work focuses on how ethnographic and Indigenous epistemologies can be brought into dialogue to shape new forms of socio-environmental understanding and practice. Her current research investigates sea level rise, managed retreat, and how communities adapt and forge futures in the face of climate change.She is the author of three books—Conservation is Our Government Now (2006), From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive (2012), and Dispossession and the Environment (2016)—the last of which won the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.

This event will take place in THH 309k. For any questions, please contact the Ethnography Studio at ethnographystudio@gmail.com