Desiree Fiske
Fields of Study: International Relations, Political Theory, and Environmental Politics and Policy
About: Desirée is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science. She obtained her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and earned a Five Colleges’ Certificate in International Relations. Desirée joined the Political Science Department in 2013 to pursue her Master’s Degree (2015) and enrolled in the Ph.D. program to continue her studies in Global Environmental Governance. Desirée’s dissertation research captures a broad range of the discipline – exploring the discursive impacts of the Anthropocene through case studies of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) and its global Biosphere Reserves. Her research reveals tensions between concepts of conservation and sustainable development in light of rapid environmental change and narratives of “humans as a geological force.” The data collected in the research project has the potential to inform MAB and biosphere reserves on the organizational capacity of sites and the diverse interests across the network and between institutional levels of governance.
Desirée is a Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, former Sustainable Leadership Fellow (2018-2019) with the School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES), Graduate Student Project Manager for the Global Challenges Research Team: World Wide Views on Climate and Energy with SoGES (2015-2016), Site Host Manager for World Wide Views on Climate and Energy (2015), former graduate teaching assistant (2013-2019), and an Instructor for the Department. Desirée also works for Rocky Mountain National Park on visitor use management issues.
