Nora Sylvander
Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies
Dr. Nora Sylvander is a Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as well as Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is also Co-Director of the Geography minor. Her expertise is in Latin America and environmental conservation, discourses, and identities.
Research Interests
Dr. Sylvander is a human geographer and political ecologist. Her research focuses on the politics of environmental conservation and territorial and resource conflicts in Latin America.
Her long-term research project in Nicaragua problematizes the dominant framing of territorial conflicts between indigenous communities and non-indigenous migrants as “inter-ethnic” and “local.” She suggests that this narrative obscures the long histories of appropriation and colonization of indigenous territories, shaped by deeply rooted political and economic drivers and interests.
Another part of her research looks at and challenges exclusionary environmental conservation approaches. In particular, she analyzes how the establishment of protected areas territorializes space and leads to direct and indirect dispossession of indigenous and local communities. She is also interested in the production of environmental identities and the ways in which these constructions shape access to land and resources.
Biography
Dr. Nora Sylvander joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in Fall 2022 as Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Forest Ecology from the University of Helsinki, after which she worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Managua, Nicaragua. Dr. Sylvander received her Ph.D. in Human Geography from the Ohio State University in 2019, after which she worked as a Fellow in Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Bathija, P. & Sylvander, N. (2023) Conservation regimes of exclusion: NGOs and the role of discourse in legitimising dispossession from protected areas in India, Political Geography Open Research, 2(2023): xx-xx
Sylvander, N. (2021) Territorial cleansing for whom? Indigenous rights, conservation, and state territorialization in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, Nicaragua, Geoforum, 121(May 2021): 23-32
Sylvander, N. (2021) “They destroy everything”: Racialising discourses, environmental conservation narratives, and territorial belonging in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, in: McCall, M.L, Boni Noguez, A., Napoletano, B., Rico-Rodríguez, T. (eds.)
Sylvander, N. (2021) Why we should not protect 30 % of the Earth’s surface, Res Publica, 6: 44-49
Sylvander, N. (2018) Saneamiento territorial in Nicaragua, and the prospects for resolving indigenous-mestizo land conflicts, Journal of Latin American Geography, 17(1): 166-194
Courses Taught
- INST 200 Thinking globally
- INST 207 Latin American studies
- ANTH/GEOG 105 Introduction to environment and society
- ANTH/GEOG 360 Political ecology
Education
Ph.D. Geography, Ohio State University Main Campus (2019)