Andrea J. Nightingale: Bounding unruly environmental change
Andrea began her career on sailboats, mountaintops, and swamps, teaching environmental education to school children and adults in the USA. She interspersed outdoor education with work for the US Forest Service as a Ranger and Fisheries Technician. In the mid-1990s, she trained as a geographer at the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota (2001). She was a MacArthur Fellow in an interdisciplinary global studies training program and held National Science Foundation Graduate Student awards, and a Fulbright award in Nepal for her research. After finishing her Ph.D., Andrea had a faculty position as an Environmental Geographer at the University of Edinburgh from 2002-2012. In 2012 she joined the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and helped found their Environmental Social Science research program. In 2015 she moved to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences as Chair of Rural Development in the Global South before coming to the University of Oslo in February of 2019.
Nightingales' academic interests span political ecology, socionatures, critical development studies, feminist theory, and methodological work on mixing methods across the social and natural sciences. She feels passionate about theorizing new understandings of the society-environment nexus to account for power and politics within dynamic and unpredictable environmental change. She uses in-depth, fieldwork-based studies combined with interdisciplinary theorizing to work with ontological and methodological pluralism.