Raymond L. Bryant

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Raymond L. Bryant (Born Canada, 18 July 1961) is a British-Canadian geographer and Professor Emeritus of Political Ecology at King's College London. He is known for his founding contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology.

Contents

Education and career

Bryant studied politics and received a BA (Hons) from the University of Victoria, Canada, in 1983 and an MA from Carleton University, Canada, in 1989. He received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1993 for research on forestry in Burma. [1]

Bryant was a member of the Department of Geography at King's College London from 1993 until retiring and leaving academia in September 2020. He has also taught at Cambridge University, Yale University and University College London and was, among other places, invited to speak at the universities in Oxford, Chicago and Copenhagen. [1]

He served on the editorial boards of Political Geography, the Journal of Political Ecology, and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. [1]

Scholarship

Political ecology

Bryant played a key role in the development of political ecology as an interdisciplinary field, with implications in geography, anthropology, political science and development studies. With Sinéad Bailey, he published the landmark Third World Political Ecology (Routledge, 1997) arguing that the costs and benefits of environmental change always are distributed unequally. Environmental change also reinforces or alters social and economic inequalities as well as power relations. Bryant and Bailey developed an actor-centred perspective to show how environmental change is shaped by actors on different scales with unequal power resources. [2]

Bryant continued to synthesize research in the field, most recently in the substantial International Handbook of Political Ecology (Edward Elgar, 2015).[ citation needed ]

Forestry

A key theme in Bryant's research was the politics of forestry, particularly in Burma. He studied how the Burmese state historically has sought to control forests and forest-related activities, but also how other environmental actors including peasants, loggers, and transnational corporations have contested state control. [3]

As part of a wider effort to study ethical consumption, [4] he contributed to our understanding of the knowledge regimes and violence associated with teak branding for Western markets. [5]

NGOs and moral capital

Another theme in Bryant's research was the role of NGOs in environmental struggles and the way such organizations strategize and empower themselves by generating 'moral capital'. Through in-depth studies of NGOs in the Philippines, he argues that the 'quest for moral capital' is compromised by NGOs' need to work with political and economic elites. [6]

Personal life

Bryant lives with his wife and two children in London.

Books

Other notable publications

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Raymond Bryant". King's College London. Retrieved 2017-09-11.
  2. ↑ Bryant, Raymond; Bailey, Sinéad (1997). Third World Political Ecology. London: Routledge. ISBN   0415127440.
  3. ↑ Bryant, Raymond (1997). The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma, 1824–1994. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN   0824819098.
  4. ↑ Bryant, Raymond L.; Goodman, Michael (2004). "Consuming Narratives: The Political Ecology of 'Alternative' Consumption". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 29 (3): 344–366. Bibcode:2004TrIBG..29..344B. doi:10.1111/j.0020-2754.2004.00333.x.
  5. ↑ Bryant, Raymond L. (2013). "Branding Natural Resources: Science, Violence and Marketing in the Making of Teak". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 38 (4): 517–530. Bibcode:2013TrIBG..38..517B. doi:10.1111/tran.12006.
  6. ↑ Bryant, Raymond (2005). Nongovernmental Organizations in Environmental Struggles: Politics and the Making of Moral Capital in the Philippines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN   0300106599.
  7. ↑ https://we.riseup.net/assets/317006/Raymond+L.+Bryant+%28ed.%29-The+International+Handbook+of+Political+Ecology-Edward+Elgar+%282015%29.pdf%7CThe International Handbook of Political Ecology
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