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- 2023 Archives
- Scientists dig deep and find a way to accurately predict snowmelt after droughts
- Cracking the Case of Missing Snowmelt After Drought
- 2023 Esri Canada GIS Scholarship for SFU
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Daniel Murphy
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Kyle Kusack
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Matthew Taylor
- Anke Baker Wins Staff Achievement Award
- Spring 2023 Virtual Geospeaker Event with Ginger Gosnell-Myers
- CAG Paper Presentation Award - Congratulations to Alysha van Duynhoven!
- Informing & Engaging Urban Youth on Public Hearings: GEOG 363 Final Showcase
- Research Talk: Modeling Urban Wetland Complexities
- Highlight Paper: Quantifying land carbon cycle feedbacks under negative CO2 emissions
- Bright Addae winner of the 2023 SFU ECCE GIS Scholarship Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Jonny Cripps
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Diandra Oliver
- 2023 Geospeaker Presentation with Dr. Pauline McGuirk
- Congratulations to Our Graduates - October 2023
- Evaluating the impact of educational goals at SFU
- The Belongings of Precariously Housed People - A Report
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Takuma Mihara
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- 2023 Distinguished Speaker Presentation with Dr. Deb Cowen
- Cheers to Paul Degrace and his well-earned retirement!
- 2024 Archives
- Professor Nicholas Blomley Honored with the Community-Engaged Research Achievement Award
- Graduate Students Claire Shapton and Marina Chavez Honored with the Community-Engaged Graduate Scholar Award
- Applications now open: 2024 ESRI Canada GIS Scholarship for SFU
- Associate Professor Rosemary Collard achieves 13th place on SFU Altmetric List
- The PEAK feature: GSU hosts inaugural RANGE conference
- Gabrielle Wong wins First Prize in 2023 Student Learning Commons Writing Contest
- Gabrielle Wong receives Warren Gill Memorial Award
- Professor Nick Blomley receives Warren Gill Memorial Award for Community Impact
- Geography Student Union recipient of the FENV 2024 Changemaker Awards
- Senior Lecturer Tara Holland reveals the secret sauce of great teaching
- Senior Lecturer Tara Holland Receives SFU 2023 Excellence in Teaching Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Bright Addae
- GIS undergraduate students participate in the Canada-wide 2024 AppChallenge competition
- Senior Lecturer Andrew Perkins Receives SFU 2024 Dean's Award of Excellence in Teaching
- Congratulations to Alysha van Duynhoven, Canada's 2024 ESRI Young Scholar
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Robert Ehlert
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- Eugene McCann writes on "livable cities" in The Tyee
- Tiana Andjelic wins the 2024 SFU ECCE GIS Scholarship Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Marina Chavez
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Mia Fitzpatrick
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Lan Qing Zhao
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Tyler Cole
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Benjamin Lartey
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- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Max Hurson
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to John Sykes
- Farewell to Robert "Bob" Horsfall, Associate Professor
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to André Araújo
- SFU Geography welcomes ethnobotanist, Leigh Joseph, as professor of Indigenous geographies
- Physical Geography September: What is Physical Geography?
- Alysha Van Duynhoven communicates award-winning research at international GIS conference
- How Dr. Tracy Brennand’s visionary leadership shaped the Department of Geography - a heartfelt thank-you
- Dr. Tracy Brennand honoured with the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Jay Matsushiba
- Human Geography October: What is Human Geography?
- MA Student Joy Russell featured on CBC Vancouver
- Human Geography October: What is Urban Worlds?
- Ajay Minhas Receives 2024 Warren Gill Award
- Dr. Nadine Schuurman featured in SFU news article on Runnability
- GIS Month: What is Geographic Information Science (GIS)?
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Joy Russell
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Background & Research Projects
My interests centre on environmental politics. I look at how property rights and access to natural resources are linked to ethnicity, markets, state policies, local social histories, and globalization. My work to date has focused on ethnic minority farmers on the borders of China, Laos, Thailand, and Burma—the former Golden Triangle, now featured as the Golden Economic Quadrangle. In future I plan to explore resource access for aboriginal peoples in Canada.
My first major project, a comparative study of China and Thailand, examined how Akha shifting cultivators’ resource access and land use were mediated by their location on international boundaries and by their incorporation into the state imaginaries of these dramatically different political regimes. This study resulted in Border Landscapes: the Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand (2005) published by the University of Washington Press in the series on Culture, Place, and Nature. The book’s contributions are a theorization of borders in regions with multiple ethnic groups and strong patronage relations, and a conceptualization of landscape plasticity, or flexible forms of land access and use that give agency to farmers dealing with rapidly changing political economies. The results of this research have also been published as articles in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Development and Change, and Conservation and Society as well as in the Common Property Resource Digest and Watershed. Chapters based on this work have appeared in Mountains of the World: Forests and Mountains (2000) from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and in the conference volume Links between Cultures and Biodiversity (2000). A concise case study of this research appeared in Forests and Society: Sustainability and Life Cycles of Forests in Human Landscapes (2005).
More recent research in Mengsong, the Akha village in Xishuangbanna, China, resulted in a brief biography of the village head in Narratives of the Chinese Economic Reforms (2005), edited by Dorothy Solinger. Research in Mengsong in 2005 and 2006 led to articles on the introduction of monocropping in Indigenous Affairs (2005), and on the role of “indigenous knowledge” in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political (2007). Mengsong will be a long-term research site throughout my career.
During a postdoctoral fellowship at Lund University in Sweden, I built on and extended the focus on property rights in natural resources through a workshop that convened scholars of Central and Eastern Europe, Siberia, China and Vietnam to discuss post-socialist property rights in rural resources. Following the workshop, I helped guest edited a special issue of Conservation and Society, for which I was lead author on the introductory essay. The introduction and set of articles explore Katherine Verdery’s notion of “fuzzy property,” contributing new kinds of “fuzzy property” as well as challenging the applicability of Verdery’s definition to Asia.
My recently completed research was funded by a U.S. National Science Foundation grant, “Understanding Dynamic Resource Management Systems and Land Cover Transitions in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia.” Our China team, in collaboration with teams from Laos and Thailand, explored the adoption of cash crops as a result of the new highway linking Kunming (China) and Bangkok (Thailand). Our findings in Xishuangbanna showed that rubber is rapidly expanding across the region in response to China’s skyrocketing demand for natural rubber, and is transforming landscapes, livelihoods, and identities.
To extend this research, a SSHRC standard grant, “Governing People, Spaces and Rubber in Xishuangbanna, China” (2007-2011) is allowing two graduate students and me to explore issues of governmentality centred on the co-production of identities, spaces, and land use practices under China’s globalization.
Books
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2007. Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand, paperback edition published by Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2005. Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Refereed Articles
Sturgeon, Janet C. “Governing Minorities and Development in Xishuangbanna, China: Akha and Dai Rubber Farmers as Entrepreneurs,” Geoforum 41(2), 2010.
Xu, Jianchu, Louis Lebel, and Janet C. Sturgeon. “Functional links between biodiversity, livelihoods and culture in a Hani swidden landscape in Southwest China,” Ecology and Society 14(2), 2009.
Fox, Jefferson, Yayoi Fujita, Dimbab Ngidang, Nancy Peluso, Leslie Potter, Niken Sakuntaladewi, Janet Sturgeon, David Thomas, “The Political Ecomony of Swidden in Southeast Asia,” Human Ecology, 2009.
“Quality Control: Resource Access and Local Village Elections in Rural China,” Modern Asian Studies 43(2):481-509, 2009.
Sturgeon, Janet C. And Nicholas K. Menzies, “Ideological Landscapes: Rubber in Xishuangbanna, 1950-2007.” Asian Geographer 25 (1-2):21-37, 2008.
“Pathways of ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ in Yunnan, China,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32(1):129-153, 2007
Other
Blomley, Nicholas and Janet C. Sturgeon. “Property as Abstraction”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(2):564-6.
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2008. Interviewed by Nicholas Farrelly in New Mandala: New Perspectives on Mainland Southeast Asia.
http://rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/newmandala/2008/02/25/interview-with-professor-janet-sturgeon/
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2006. “Forest Communities in China and Thailand,” in Forests and Society: Sustainability and Life Cycles of Forests in Human Landscapes, Vogt, K.A., Honea, J.M., Vogt, D.J., Edmonds, R.L., Patel-Weynand, T., Sigurdardottir, R. and Andreu M.G. Oxfordshire, UK: CABI Publishing, CAB International.
Sturgeon, Janet C. and Thomas Sikor. 2005. “Fuzzy Property in Postsocialist Asia and Europe,” in Transformation als Typ sozialen Wandels: Postsozialistische Lektionen, historische und interkulturelle Vergleiche (Transformation as a Type of Social Change: Postsocialist Lessons, historical and intercultural comparisons), Raj Kollmorgen, ed. Munich: Lit Verlag Munster.
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2005. “The True Story of Akheu,” in Narratives of the Chinese Economic Reform, Dorothy Solinger, ed. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Press.
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2005. Tea for Trees: The Impact of State Policies on the Akha in Yunnan, Indigenous Affairs 2/05.
Sturgeon, Janet. 2000 . “Swidden gain, swidden loss: Akha land use in upland Yunnan.” Mountains of the World: Forests and Mountains. Geneva: United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development 2000.
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2000. “ State and Local Knowledge Forms: Akha Landuse in Mengsong, Xishuangbanna.”Xu Jianchu et al., eds. Links between Cultures and Biodiversity. Kunming: Yunnan Science and Technology Press.
Sturgeon, Janet. 1998 . “State Policies, Ethnic Identity, and Forests in China and Thailand,” Common Property Resource Digest, 44:1-5.
Courses
This instructor is currently not teaching any courses.