LAURA A. GERMAN, PH.D.

I am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Integrative Conservation Research at the University of Georgia. I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a broad interest in how more-than-human futures are made through land and environmental governance ideas and practices. 

My current research has several current threads. The first is a focus on how customary land in Africa is being re-made and re-purposed through knowledge practices that serve to justify the commodification of land and its expropriation by multinational corporations. In 2022, this work was published in a book with University of Michigan Press, Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance in Africa. I have also been working in partnership with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), Center for Native Health and research partners to support EBCI efforts to heal the land through the restoration of cultural burning to homelands. A third project is an interdisciplinary engagement between lawyers and anthropologists to re-think contract from the vantage point of the African continent and the contractual practices one can observe there. A final body of work involves writing projects with student and faculty colleagues to re-envision conservation and environmental governance. These disparate projects are connected by an interest in how theory and method can be deployed in support of more sustainable, anti-oppressive futures. 

Prior to my appointment at UGA, I worked as Senior Scientist for the Center for International Forestry Research based in Indonesia (2007 - 2011), where I co-led the research domain "Globalized Trade and Investment and its Impacts on Forests and Forest Communities" and explored the dynamics associated with the biofuel boom, the global "land grab" and China's growing influence in the Congo Basin and Miombo Forest biomes. Prior to that, I worked as Scientist with the World Agroforestry Center and Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in East and Central Africa (2002 - 2007), where I worked with national agricultural research and extension systems in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to support institutional innovations to support farmers in addressing their own environmental management concerns. I have also contributed to international policy processes, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2024-present), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2010) and biofuel sustainability standards (RSB and RSPO).