Sharlene Mollett, University of Toronto
“Land’s Future: Residential Tourism and the Promise of Development in Panama”

Sharlene Mollett is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Critical Development Studies and the Department of Human Geography Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Her research is at the intersection of postcolonial political ecology and critical feminist/racial studies in the Americas and interrogates the multiple ways in which racial ideologies and patriarchy shape natural resource conflict and management in Latin America, specifically in Honduras and Panama. Broadly her research interests include 1) the interrogation of place-specific representations and meanings of race and gender and the ways these subjectivities are embedded in development practice; 2) the ways in which the land use practices and land tenure systems of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and non-indigenous campesinos are incorporated into protected area management, land regularization and tourism development; and 3) the feminist political ecologies of indigenous and Afro-descendant women’s land control. Her work is published in such journals as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Latin American Research Review, Geoforum, Latin American Perspectives, Gender, Place and Culture, and Cultural Geographies