Genese Sodikoff
IDSC/M.A. '96

1. Please describe your present professional position? Please include the URL of your organization.

I am currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark.

www.rutgers-newark.rutgers.edu/socant

2. What do you find satisfying about your position?

Being an academic is satisfying on many levels. Teaching courses in cultural anthropology to undergraduates gives me the opportunity to delve into a range of subject matters very different from my areas of expertise, and I find this freedom to explore very rewarding. Through my own and others' scholarship, I stay connected to Madagascar, where I conducted my ethnographic research. The discipline offers a rich life of the mind and a sense of political engagement with the world, especially through pedagogy and the chance to guide students toward new ways of knowing and seeing.

3. How did the IDSC program at Clark University help to prepare you?

The program in International Development and Social Change (as it was then called) made me a critical thinker and therefore more conscientious of the ethical complexities of environment and development work. I not only learned practical approaches to community development and natural resource management but also grasped the relationship between practice and theory. The program taught me to critically analyze international assistance, and this is essential, in my view, for scholars and practitioners alike. Very pragmatically too, people in the IDSC program hooked me up with contacts in Madagascar and assisted me in coming up with a research project that won me a Fulbright grant for a year of fieldwork in Madagascar. The ethnographic experience was formative.

4. Why should prospective students enroll in the IDSC program at Clark University?

Beyond the reasons I mention above, that Clark's IDCE program trains students in critical thinking and conscientious practice, as well as in a variety of concrete skills, I had a great time as a graduate student at Clark. There was a real closeness among the graduate students and a lot of socializing.

5. Did you have an internship as part of your Clark education? If so, how did it help to connect you to your current career?

I did not have an external internship but had the opportunity to work as a research assistant on the ECOGEN project with Barbara Thomas-Slayter. I also collaborated with Dick Ford on technical papers about conservation in Madagascar. I draw on these experiences all the time in academia, in editing, crafting research proposals and book projects, etc. My familiarity with development-in-practice before (as a Peace Corps Volunteer) and during my years at Clark lends a certain amount of legitimacy or credibility to my research in political ecology. People can't say I have never been there.

6. What was the topic of your research while at Clark University?

My masters thesis focuses on an Integrated Conservation and Development Project in central-eastern Madagascar and some of the historical and present-day reasons for subsistence farmers' opposition to conservation efforts and ecotourism.