Sustainable Development

Teaching

SD 2400: Principles of Sustainable Development

SD 2800: Environmental Justice and Sustainability

SD 3375: Sustainability, Economics, and Development

SD 4401: Applications of Sustainable Development

SD 4550: Senior Seminar

Background

Brian J. Burke is an Associate Professor in the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. After receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, he served as a post-doctoral researcher with the Coweeta Listening Project at the University of Georgia and the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. His research aims to support movements for social justice, environmental sustainability, and solidarity economies by examining their ethical visions, strategies, and the challenges they face. Drawing on post-structural political economy and political ecology, he is particularly interested in the ways that material and socio-cultural dynamics work together to constrain and enable change. His work has included projects on urban environmental activism and appropriate technologies on the US-Mexico border, rural cooperatives in Brazil and Paraguay, alternative economies in Colombia, and environmental knowledge production in southern Appalachia. He is currently engaged in a long-term, participatory research project to understand how traditional, sustainable farming systems are vulnerable to climate change, demographic change, and policy change, and to identify desirable adaptation options.

Representative Publications

Burke, Brian. 2022. Social Exchange: Barter as Economic and Cultural Activism in Medellin, Columbia. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.

Welch-Devine, Meredith, Anne Sourdril, and Brian J. Burke (Eds). 2020. Changing Climate, Changing Worlds: Local Knowledge and the Challenges of Social and Ecological Change. Switzerland: Springer Nature. 

Vásquez-León, Marcela, Brian J. Burke, and Timothy J. Finan (Eds). 2017. Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change: Experiences from Rural Latin America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Welch-Devine, Meredith, Brian J. Burke, Jennifer Jo Thompson, Beñat Eppherre, Monique Eppherre, Pierre Jaragoyhen, Simon Maraud, Helene Roland, and Anne Sourdril. 2025. “Layering” participation to permit sustainable and non-exploitative knowledge co-production. Society and Natural Resources special issue on the theory and practice of knowledge co-production. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2025.2562397

Welch-Devine, Meredith, Brian J. Burke, Jennifer Jo Thompson, Beñat Eppherre, Monique Eppherre, Pierre Jaragoyhen, Simon Maraud, Helene Roland, and Anne Sourdril. 2025. Designing research collaboratively: Socioenvironmental systems research in the French Basque Country. Human Organization 84(2): 218-233. https://doi.org/10.1080/00187259.2024.2431079

Burke, Brian J., John-Ben Soileau, and Karin Friederic. 2023. Transnational solidarity and quilombo postcapitalism: Building alternatives to development amid Brazilian racial hierarchy and Amazonian extractivism. Rethinking Marxism 35: 63-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2159742

Burke, Brian J., Sydney Blume, and Michael Weiss. 2023. Climate Justice Counter-Hegemony: Crafting an Anthropological Climate Politics through Student-Faculty Collaborations in the Classroom and on the Street. In: Anthropology and Climate Change: From Transformations to World-Making Practices, eds. Susie Crate and Mark Nutall. New York: Routledge.

Burke, Brian J., Meredith Welch-Devine, and Anne Sourdril. 2020. Understanding Microexperiences of Climate Change: How Climate Ethnography Informs Collaboration, Adaptation, and Effective Responses. In: Changing Climate, Changing Worlds: Local Knowledge and the Challenges of Social and Ecological Change, eds. Meredith Welch-Devine, Anne Sourdril, and Brian J. Burke. New York: Springer.

Friederic, Karin and Brian J. Burke. 2019. La Revolución Ciudadana and Social Medicine: Undermining Community in the State Provision of Health Care in Ecuador. Global Public Health. 14(6-7): 884-898.

Rice, Jennifer L., Brian J. Burke, and Nik Heynen. 2015. Knowing Climate Change, Embodying Climate Praxis: Experiential Knowledge in Southern Appalachia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 253-262. 

Burke, Brian J., Meredith Welch-Devine, and Seth Gustafson. 2015. Nature Talk in an Appalachian Newspaper: What Environmental Discourse Analysis Reveals about Efforts to Address Exurbanization and Climate Change. Human Organization 74(2): 185-196.  

Burke, Brian J., Meredith Welch-Devine, Seth Gustafson, Nik Heynen, Jennifer L. Rice, Ted L. Gragson, Sakura Evans, and Donald R. Nelson. 2015. Can Science Writing Collectives Overcome the Barriers to More Democratic Science Communication? Environmental Communication Praxis in Southern Appalachia. Environmental Communication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2014.999695

Burke, Brian J. and Nik Heynen. 2014. Transforming Participatory Science into Socio-Ecological Praxis: Valuing Marginalized Environmental Knowledges in the Face of the Neoliberalization of Nature and Science. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 5(1): 7-27.

Burke, Brian J. and Boone Shear. 2014. Introduction: Engaged Scholarship for Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies. Journal of Political Ecology 21: 127-144. [Part of a special issue of the Journal of Political Ecology compiled by Burke and Shear.]

Burke, Brian J. and Beatriz Arjona. 2013. Experiments with Alternative Political Ecologies: Examining the Construction of Ecovillages and Ecovillagers in Colombia. In: Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillage Design for a Sustainable Future. Eds, Josh Lockyer and Jim Veteto. New York: Berghahn Books.

Burke, Brian J and Jessica Piekielek. 2011. Cooperatives, Politics, and Development in Rural Paraguay. Human Organization 70(4): 355-365.

Burke, Brian J. 2010. Cooperatives for “Fair Globalization”? Indigenous People, Cooperatives and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Brazilian Amazon. Latin American Perspectives 37(6): 30-52.