Professor of Geography at the American University, Washington DC, USA

Jesse Ribot studies local democracy, resource access, and social vulnerability in the face of climate change, largely through research in West Africa and comparative cases elsewhere. He is teaching environmental politics in the School of International Service at American University. In the past, he taught in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign from 2008 to 2018. Before 2008, he was a senior associate of the World Resources Institute and taught in the Urban Studies and Planning department at MIT. He has been 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 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.

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