Anthony Bebbington, Director of the Graduate School of Geography and Milton P. and Alice C. Higgins Professor of Environment and Society at Clark University, was recently awarded a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in support of his forthcoming book, “Natural resource extraction in Latin America: transforming the human-environment, challenging social science.”
Professor Bebbington’s research addresses the political ecology of rural change, with a particular focus on extractive industries and socio-environmental conflicts, social movements, and indigenous organizations and livelihoods. He has worked throughout South and Central America, primarily in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and more recently in El Salvador.
Bebbington is one of only two geography and environmental scientists among the 178 artists, scientists and scholars selected from almost 3,000 applicants in the Guggenheim Foundation’s ninetieth annual competition for fellowships, which are awarded on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise.
“Being named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation is a real privilege as well as a bit of a surprise.” Bebbington says. “The Fellowship will give me the time to round out lessons from our last decade of work on natural resource extraction in Latin America, as well as to begin identifying new avenues for research. I am very grateful.”
Professor Bebbington is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Manchester; UK and a Research Associate of the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, Peru. He has held fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council the Ibero-American Institute/Free University of Berlin; the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Chile; the Fulbright Commission and the Inter-American Foundation. His most recent books include “Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil and Gas in Latin America” (University of Texas Press, 2013, ed. with J. Bury); “Social Conflict, Economic Development and Extractive Industries: Evidence from Latin America” (Routledge, 2012, ed.); and “Industrias Extractivas, Conflicto Social y Dinámicas Institucionales en la Región Andina” (IEP/CEPES, 2013).
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $315 million in Fellowships to almost 17,700 individuals, including scores of Nobel laureates and poets laureate, as well as winners of Pulitzer Prizes, Fields Medals, and other important, internationally recognized honors.
Founded in 1887 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Clark University is a liberal arts-based research university addressing social and human imperatives on a global scale. Nationally renowned as a college that changes lives, Clark is emerging as a transformative force in higher education today. LEEP (Liberal Education and Effective Practice) is Clark’s pioneering model of education that combines a robust liberal arts curriculum with life-changing world and workplace experiences. Clark’s faculty and students work across boundaries to develop solutions to complex challenges in the natural sciences, psychology, geography, management, urban education, Holocaust and genocide studies, environmental studies, and international development and social change. The Clark educational experience embodies the University’s motto: Challenge convention. Change our world.
