MdM Keynote Speaker Series: "Understanding the processes of modernization of mountain landscapes in the Pyrenees", by Ismael Vaccaro

Ismael Vaccaro, from the Institución Milá y Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Barcelona, will be giving a keynote talk on “Understanding the processes of modernization of mountain landscapes in the Pyrenees”.

MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2024


Title: “Understanding the processes of modernization of mountain landscapes in the Pyrenees”

Speaker:  Ismael Vaccaro, Institución Milá y Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Barcelona
 

Date: Monday, 3^rd of June 2024 
Time: from 10:00 to 11:00 
Venue: Room Z/023 - Z/022  and Online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86979096960?pwd=cmEvdmlSN08wOTh3Mk05VlRvWXRyUT09

The attempt to understand the reasons behind the high densities of protected areas in the Pyrenees forced us to implement a landscape-wide ethnographic and historical research that connected demography with successive waves of public policies, different types of productive practices, managerial institutions and property regimes, changes in land cover, and subjective managerial priorities. This process of transformation of some peripheral rural areas in permanent tension with the urban centers of the country, led by the State and market-driven incentives, resulted in the radical “modernization” of their administrative structure, property theory regimes, demographic makeup, infrastructures network, and economic model.

Professor Vaccaro's research interests include environmental anthropology, political ecology, property theory, landscape analysis, the tensions between the rural and the urban, development and globalization, political and economic anthropology, conservation policies, climate change, post-industrial spaces, anthropology of mining, and urban-rural interactions. He has conducted research in Europe, Mexico, Solomon Islands, and the lakes of Uganda. His academic background includes a BA in Anthropology (UB), and BA in Political sciences (UAB), a MA in Anthropology (EHESS), and an MA and a PhD in Environmental Anthropology (University of Washington). He has taught at the McGill University and the University of Washington, and he is currently a researcher at the Institución Milá y Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Barcelona.