Morehouse, Barbara

Understanding the processes and ecological impacts of environmental variability and change remains a central theme within Geography, and with good reason. Recent severe weather and climate events underscore the vulnerabilities in our personal and societal buffering mechanisms. Scientific knowledge offers opportunities for reducing sensitivities and vulnerabilities to environmental change, but by itself, science is not sufficient - it must be integrated into decision making processes and institutional structures. My current research interests revolve around four interrelated themes: political ecologies of environmental variability and change, discursive framing of environmental stresses, development of decision support tools and materials, and coproduction of environmental science and policy. Much of my work involves interdisciplinary research that integrates across these four themes. My primary goal is to characterize and assess environment-society interactions in a manner that facilitates science-society collaborations to solve mutually identified problems. The discursive framing of problems and alternative solutions is an integral part of the analysis, as is collaborative development and dissemination of decision support products. This research in turn provides a basic framework for analyzing how science-society collaborations come to be established, how they operate, who is involved, and to what extent the collaborations are successful in addressing identified problems. I am particularly interested in analyzing collaborative activities through which knowledge becomes transformed into useful, usable, credible, and salient products that are specifically designed to support decision making processes.