Please Note: This event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled.

Citizenship Speaker Series

Michael Watts

"Spaces of Insurgency"

Friday, May 18, 2012
3:30 p.m.
Haggerty Hall 0180 
Building 037, 1775 College Rd, Columbus, OH 43210

Michael Watts is Professor of Geography and Class of 1963 Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. He has research interests in political economy, political ecology, Africa, South Asia, development, peasant societies, social and cultural theory, U.S. agriculture, Islam and social movements, the energy transition, resource conflicts, the oil industry.

Watts served for ten years as the Director of Berkeley's Institute of International Studies (1994-2004), which promotes cross-area and cross-disciplinary research and training on transnational and global issues. He established with Professor Nancy Peluso the Berkeley Working Group on Environmental Politics, the major centre for cross disciplinary political ecological research on the Berkeley campus. In addition, he has served as director of the Africa Studies Center and the Rotary Peace Fellows program, and as co-director of the undergraduate Development Studies Program (a degree granting inter-disciplinary program with almost 100 majors).

He has worked with various development organizations and philanthropic institutions, such as UNDP, the Ford Foundation, OXFAM, and a number of small NGOs in Africa (most recently Environmental Rights Action and Our Niger Delta in Nigeria). He also serves on the Board of a number of non-profits, including the Pacific Institute in Oakland, and has given testimony of human and environmental rights in Nigeria to Congress and other policy groups in Washington DC.

He is author of The Curse of the Black Gold (Powerhouse Press, 2008) with photograher Ed Kashi, and co-editor of Global Political Ecology (Routledge, 2010) with Paul Robbins and Richard Peet.

Watts holds a Ph.D. (1979) from the University of Michigan.

Michael Watts
Professor of Geography and Class of 1963 Chair
University of California at Berkeley