Sustainable Development

Rebecca Witter is an Associate Professor of Sustainable Development at Appalachian State University. She positions her research, teaching, and service at the intersections between culture,  power, environment, and development and prioritizes collaboration, connection, and curiosity in her work. 

In 2021 Witter co-founded the Eastern North Carolina Environmental Justice Collaborative (“EJ Co-Lab”) with collaborators, Dana Powell, Donna Chavis, Jefferson Currie, Mac Legerton, Danielle Koonce, and Sherri White-Williamson. The EJ Co-Lab is a community university research partnership that aims to strengthen existing capacities and nurture new capabilities for social resilience and environmental justice in rural eastern North Carolina, especially with Black, Indigenous, and multiracial communities facing extractive industries.

Over the past two decades, Witter conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Limpopo Borderlands region of southern Africa, inclusive of Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park and South Africa’s Kruger National Park. She worked with now former residents of the Limpopo Park and with her long-term partner in research, Divy Mavasa, to understand more than a century of conservation-related dispossession and its relations to settler colonialism, labor, land, and hunting.

Witter received the College of Fine and Applied Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and the College’s Outstanding Scholarship Award in 2023. She has served as the Departmental Honors Program Director since 2023 and on the NC Governor’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council since 2024.

Before joining the faculty at App State, Witter held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute of Resources Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia where she worked under the mentorship of Dr. Terre Satterfield. She received her PhD in Environmental Anthropology at the University of Georgia under the mentorship of Dr. Pete Brosius.

Witter values deeply the opportunity she has to work with students in and beyond their university journeys. Please feel encouraged to reach out to her.

Education 
Ph.D. 2010, Environmental Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens GA, USA

B.A. 1998, International Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA

Research and Teaching Interests
The dynamic intersections (material, political, and symbolic) between society, economy, and environment; environmental justice and environmental conservation; tenure relations, settler colonialism, and dispossession; wildlife hunting, industrialized agricultural and bioenergy development; transdisciplinary, ethnographic, and collaborative methodologies; indigenous rights; feminist theory; critical development studies

Teaching and Mentorship
Witter contributes to the teaching and development of the following courses: Principles of Sustainable Development (SD 2400); Development Theory and Practice (SD 2700); Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (SD 2800); Conservation and Development (SD 3365); Gender, Inequality, and Sustainable Development (SD 3475); Sustainability and Creative Practice (SD 3536); Environment and Development in the Global South (SD 3700); and Applications in Environmental Justice (SD 4402). She also taught independent studies related to Human-Elephant Relations and Global Environmental Justice.

In addition to her teaching, Witter served as Mentor and Advisor for several outstanding Undergraduate Research Assistants who received training and first-hand experience in collaborative and community-engaged research related: Taylor Ouellette, Ben Pluska, Bekah Nielsen, Mollie Donovan, Hazel Pardington, Isabella King, Josie Patch, Edgar Villeda, and Kira Plummer.

She also chaired the following undergraduate Honors Theses:
Pluska, Ben. Sensing Environmental Injustice Amidst Late Industrialism in Eastern North Carolina, December 2023.
Huber, Abbey. “We’re All Going to Die:” Discourses of Planetary Crisis and the Formation of Collective Imaginaries, May 2020.
Burrows, Lauren. “A Spiritual Heritage”: Change and Continuity in Ancestrally Based Authority over Land in Northern Ghana. Appalachian State University. August 2019.
Milburn, Clare. “¡La soja mata!”: The Slow Violence of Soy in Paraguay. Appalachian State University, May 2019.

Representative Publications
Powell, D., J. Currie, D. Koonce, M. Legerton, and R. Witter. 2024. Renewable Ruse: Social Lives and Subaltern Knowledges of Biomass and Biogas in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains. Engaging Science, Technology and Society 10: 32–68.

Tulbure, M. J. Caineta, B. Cox, S. Stehman, A. Ercumen, R. Witter, R. Emanuel, D. Powell, K. Burdette, S. White-Williamson, and S. Tuberty. 2024. Earth Observation Data to Support Environmental Justice: Linking Non-permitted Poultry Operations to Social Vulnerability Indices. GeoHealth 12. 

Woods, C., D. Koonce, R. Witter, S. White-Williamson, D. Koonce, C. Babyak, and S. Tuberty. “Collaborative Research as Action: Advancing Rural Environmental Justice, Water Equity, and Well-being in Eastern NC.” Accepted. Special Issue on Action Research in Environmental Justice.

Witter, R. and D. Powell. 2022. Phantoms within and beyond the frame:  Stirrings of justice amidst specters of rural capitalism. Engagement: A blog published by the Anthropology and Environment Society.

Witter, R. 2021. Rhinos as “the mine” and the fugitive meanings of illegal wildlife hunting. Conservation and Society.

Witter, R. 2021. Why Militarized Conservation may be Counter-productive: Illegal Wildlife Hunting as Defiance. Journal of Political Ecology 28(1): 175–192.

Witter, R. and T. Satterfield. 2019. Rhino poaching and the “slow violence” of conservation-related resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park. Geoforum 101: 275–284.

England, L. J. Carlisle, R. Witter, D. Davidson, L. Holman, and D. Powell. 2019. Storying Climate Change at Appalachian State University. Practicing Anthropology 41 (3): 21–26.

Witter, R. and T. Satterfield. 2018. The Ebb and Flow of Indigenous Rights Recognitions in Conservation Policy. Development and Change 50 (4): 1083–1108.

Ekblom, A., M. Notelid, and R. Witter. 2017. Negotiating identity and heritage through authorised vernacular history, Limpopo National Park. Journal of Social Archaeology. 17(1): 49–68.

Witter, R., K. Marion-Suiseeya, R. Gruby, S. Hitchner, E. Maclin, M. Bourque, J. Brosius. 2015. Moments of Influence in Global Environmental Governance. Environmental Politics.

Witter, R. and T. Satterfield. 2014. Invisible Losses and the Logics of Resettlement Compensation. Conservation Biology 28(5): 1394-1402.

Corson, C., R. Gruby, R. Witter, S. Hagerman, D. Suarez, S. Greenburg, M. Bourque, N. Gray, and L. Campbell. 2014. Everyone’s solution? Defining and re-defining protected areas through the Convention on Biological Diversity. Conservation and Society 12: 190-202.

Witter, R. 2013. Elephant-induced displacement and the power of choice: Moral narratives and conservation related resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park. Conservation and Society 11: 406-419.

Hagerman, S., R. Witter, C. Corson, D. Suarez, E. Maclin, M. Bourque, L. Campbell. 2012.  On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation. Global Environmental Change 22:724-735.

Russell, D., R. Ashley, J. P. Brosius, R. Witter, M. Welch-Devine, K. Spainhower, and R. Barr. 2010. People, Trees and Parks: Is Agroforestry In or Out? Journal of Sustainable Forestry 29:451-476.