Michael Cox

Hi folks. I am a PhD student at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs studying environmental and natural resource management. I work at a center on campus called the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, where we are involved in a research project to analyze natural resources settings as complex social-ecological systems. My dissertation fieldwork is actually in northern New Mexico, so I'll be in Santa Fe the whole summer. Looking forward to meeting y'all

Here are my answers to the questions sent to us:

1. What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!

I am interested in natural resource management; particularly how communities of users and larger governmental bodies and effectively comanage natural resources such as forests, water, soil, or wind. I think that the discipline of natural resource management and policy has historically been overly simplistic in its treatment of natural resource dynamics and properties, and that it should be complemented or replaced by one more informed by a complex systems perspective.

2. What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?

I have been trained methodologically in econometrics, geographic information systems, and institutional analysis.

3. What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?

I am mostly interested in learning more about many different kinds of networks and methods for analyzing them.

4. Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS? (Recall that you will all be working in groups on at least one project with the goal of presenting your progress on the last day and finishing up a paper by summer's end.)

I think there are two answers to this. First, this summer I will be collecting data for my dissertation, where I am planning to analyze the acequia irrigation communities in northern New Mexico as joint social-hydrological networks, and to relate their structural properties to their sustainability and resilience. So this will obviously be occupying a fair amount of my energy while I'm at the CSSS. Secondly, and probably more amenable to a group project, I am interested in developing methods for analyzing natural resources as either emerging from or cohering themselves in complex systems, and thinking about how these qualities affect appropriate management strategies.

and this is me. with a beard.