About

Susan Paulson, Ph.D., is a Professor of Anthropology and a faculty member at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. She has an extensive academic background with a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Carleton College. Her research interests focus on Latin American studies, and she holds the position of Associate Director at the Center for Latin American Studies, a role she has occupied since 2016. Throughout her career, Dr. Paulson has held various academic and professional positions, including professorships at Miami University and Lund University in Sweden, where she served as Hedda Andersson Professor and Director of Service Learning. She has also been involved in international academic collaborations, including Fulbright teaching and research fellowships at the University of Panama, and visiting professorships at institutions such as FLACSO in Ecuador and Universidad Mayor San Simon in Bolivia. Her professional memberships and honors reflect her active engagement in the academic community. Dr. Paulson's work contributes to the understanding of Latin American cultures and societies, and she continues to be involved in research and teaching within this field.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Geography
• History
• Physics
• Thermodynamics
• Ecology
• Economic geography
• Law
• Genealogy
• Biology

Selected publications

• Ecofeminist and decolonial feminist degrowth futures

  2025-07-02

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  All moves towards degrowth futures are strengthened by attention to gender systems, which organise and give meaning to the production and reproduction of socialised humans, relationships and environments in every known society. This chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) draws on select feminist approaches to gender–environment dynamics to nourish efforts to reorient human energies and societies around care and regeneration of life. Amid biodiversity collapse, climate change and eco-social degradation, feminist movements mobilise practices of hope towards positive futures, including regenerative care for self, other humans and other nature. Possibilities for a transition from fossil-fuelled societal metabolisms operating through unequal ecological exchange to bio-based metabolisms onshored in the Global North depend on shifts away from the imperial way of life towards cultural forms centred around regenerative earth-care and commoning. Such forms are advanced by Indigenous and communitarian feminisms, and caring masculinities observed across the Americas in collective struggles for dignity, territory and intergenerational continuity. Political economic analyses of gendered historical processes that support expanding market production via structural subordination of social reproduction are met with feminist initiatives to reclaim and revalue subsistence as the core purpose of human organisation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• World-making technology entangled with coloniality, race and gender: Ecomodernist and degrowth perspectives

  Environmental Values · 2024-02-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Impelled by the intertwined expansion of capitalist institutions and fossil-fueled industry, human activity has made devastating impacts on ecosystems and earth systems. The colonial, class, racial, and gender systems that coevolved with these historical processes have long been critiqued for engineering exploitation and inequality. Yet the technologies with which these systems interact are widely portrayed as neutral and nonpartisan. This paper interrogates the purported independence of technology on two fronts. First, it uses a political ecology lens to illuminate some ways in which the generation and application of technology have been historically entangled with colonial, racial, and gender systems. Second, it considers how those entanglements have been variously obscured, acknowledged, depoliticized, and/or politicized in two realms of thought and practice: ecomodernism and degrowth. Conclusions call for bringing creative innovation of ecomodernism together with degrowth commitment to just social–ecological transformation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Degrowth and Anthropology

  2024-11-21 · 1 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Degrowth brings together a global network of ideas, actors, and practices around shared goals: reduce quantities of material and energy used by wealthy economies; curb cultural and personal obsessions with growth; and reorient institutions and worldviews around equitable well-being and caring regeneration of life. In the 1970s, Europeans began to formulate decroissance as a response to growing ecological and social costs of economic expansion; in the twenty-first century, degrowth has exploded in political debates and social movements, as well as in academic programs, research, and hundreds of publications in many languages. Anthropology, the holistic study of humans interacting with diverse environments, informs and is influenced by degrowth in fundamental ways. In the absence of a subfield called “degrowth anthropology,” the term “degrowth/anthropology” is used here to invoke a realm of overlaps and synergies among two currents of thought and practice. Recognizing that capacities to change are constrained by modes of knowing and being that make it difficult for mainstream actors to imagine alternatives, and that undermine struggles of non-dominant groups to sustain different lifeways, degrowth/anthropology celebrates opportunities to learn from and with people around the world who are mobilizing a pluriverse of worldviews and lifeways in pursuit of healthier and more just futures. The bibliography includes authors and publications inside and outside of formal disciplinary boundaries, all characterized by anthropological questions, concepts, and approaches. The heterogeneity and heterodoxy of degrowth/anthropology resists consolidation into a single canon of literature. Among countless ways to select from and organize relevant sources, this bibliography focuses on five areas: degrowth basics and thought leading to degrowth; key resources in special issues, reviews, and websites; cultural phenomena examined with anthropology of growth and degrowth; conversations with disciplines and movements advancing various forms of critical theory (including feminisms and anti/de/post-colonialisms) and engaged experiments in learning and teaching.

  PublisherDOI

• Degrowth

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A global network of scholars and activists are advancing analyses, policies, and practices oriented toward objectives of degrowth: to reduce the quantity of material and energy used by wealthy economies, to curb cultural and personal obsessions with growth, and to reorient societies around care and equitable wellbeing. Transformative potentials of degrowth are activated by interconnecting and energizing heterodox thinking and heterogeneous action. Such purposeful diversity makes it difficult to succinctly characterize the hundreds of articles and books, together with multiform events and initiatives, that variously engage degrowth. This entry introduces key concepts mobilized in the movement, and provides glimpses of intellectual genealogy and current work with select attention to decolonial, pluriversal, and feminist contributions.

  PublisherDOI

• Why are feminist perspectives, analyses, and actions vital to degrowth?

  Degrowth Journal · 2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Feminist analyses of the historical dynamics of gender systems are fundamental to the work of challenging growth-driven political economies, and of designing more equitable and balanced ecosocial systems.Feminist theories and methods that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices are vital resources for building on heterodox degrowth movements.In dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-racist efforts, intersectional feminisms have been unlearning and disrupting conventional politics of knowing and action in ways that help forge more inclusive understandings and applications necessary for degrowth futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Geography

  This book owes its existence to a vast network of generous interlocutors, mentors, colleagues, friends, and co-conspirators.First among these is the community I have been working with in Peru over repeat visits since 2008, a time when they became all of these things.Gerardo Huaracha and Luisa Cutipa have been enthusiastic, encouraging hosts who quickly became shadow academic advisers.Their adult children, Sabino, Guzmán, María, Nestor, Maruja, and Alan, and their extended family made me feel welcome in Yanque.So did Yeny Huanaco Huerta, Dante Bayona, and their children, Renzo and Leandro, who became fast friends as we ate meals together almost every day when I lived in Yanque.Rogelio Taco, Ana Carol Condori Palma, Mercedes Mercado Gonzalez

  DOI

• Convivial Conservation with Nurturing Masculinities in Brazil's Atlantic Forest

  Xtexte · 2022-04-04 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores convivial conservation, an emerging paradigm that supports care and interdependence among human and other life toward purposes of mutual regeneration and thriving. Rather than defending endangered nature from destructive people, this approach fosters intertwined human-environment care, wellbeing, and justice on multiple scales.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Convivial Conservation with Nurturing Masculinities in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest

  transcript Verlag eBooks · 2022-04-22 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores convivial conservation, an emerging paradigm that supports care and interdependence among human and other life toward purposes of mutual regeneration and thriving. Rather than defending endangered nature from destructive people, this approach fosters intertwined human-environment care, wellbeing, and justice on multiple scales.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Caring Masculinities: Stories of Interspecies Love in the Andes and Atlantic Forest

  General Anthropology · 2022-03-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• なぜ、脱成長なのか : 分断・格差・気候変動を乗り越える

  NHK出版 eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book

  第１章 「脱成長」とは何か 第２章 成長で犠牲になるもの 第３章 草の根から変革を起こす 第４章 道を切り拓く５つの改革 第５章 人々を動かすための戦略 付録 脱成長に関するよくある２３の質問への回答

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Lisa L. Gezon

  University of Alabama at Birmingham

  31 shared

• Jonathan DeVore

  University of Cologne

  30 shared

• Kevin Healy

  Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

  27 shared

• A. J. McLachlan

  Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

  25 shared

• Justin B. Richland

  25 shared

• Lilia Samayani

  Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

  25 shared

• William Mazzarella

  University of Chicago

  25 shared

• Rafael Hanampa

  Salisbury University

  25 shared