Sarah Laborde

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I am a postdoc at the Ohio State University in the Department of Anthropology, working with an interdisciplinary lab (with these people). Our team is interested in the dynamics of a floodplain in the North of Cameroon, and we are trying to understand the dynamical connections between hydrological (flooding) patterns, fish and vegetation ecology, and social dynamics. One outcome we are working towards is an integrated model of floodplain dynamics to explore possible regime shifts, for example indicators of the possible collapse of the fish population or a transition from relative social cohesion to widespread conflict. Here at the summer school I’m interested to learn about agent-based modeling and nonlinear dynamics in social and ecological systems (amongst many other things).

This project is interdisciplinary and complex in itself. One of my parallel interests, pertaining more to the social studies of science, is the documentation and analysis of the way our lab functions as an interdisciplinary team: basically looking at a group of interdisciplinary scientists as a complex system and seeing how (and what kinds of) ideas emerge in the context of interdisciplinary interactions.