Faculty Profile
Jamie Shinn

Assistant Professor

Department of Environmental Studies
224 Marshall Hall

jeshinn@esf.edu
315-470-3022

Education

PhD, Geography, Penn State University 

MA, Geography, University of Kansas 

BA, Environmental Science, Colorado College

Research

As a researcher and teacher, I am broadly interested in the relationships between humans and the environment. My scholarship examines climate adaptation, environmental governance, and disaster response and recovery. I am specifically interested in questions related to sources of social-ecological vulnerability and the potential for transformations that can lead to more just and equitable climate futures. My work is particularly focused on these topics in relation to flooding, recognizing the power of water to shape lives and livelihoods, especially under conditions of climate change that are leading to more frequent and severe flooding events in already vulnerable places. I take a mixed methods approach, with an emphasis on qualitative data collection, and I have research projects in Central Appalachia and Southern Africa. I currently have four main research projects, summarized below. A full CV is available here. 

Flood Vulnerably and Resilience in Central Appalachia: This project, currently funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation Civic Innovation Challenge program, investigates sources of vulnerability and resilience to flooding for rural West Virginia, a region with significant flood risk and high levels of socioeconomic vulnerability. Our multi-disciplinary research team, which includes state officials and nonprofit organizations, is using community-engaged research methods to build the West Virginia Flood Resiliency Framework (WVFRF). The WVFRF is unique in the nation and includes a toolkit containing analytical and visualization tools that will assist residents, local leaders, non-profits, and state officials to assess flood risk, prepare for flood disasters, and increase flood resilience for West Virginia communities.

Transformation and Just Energy Transitions in West Virginia: This collaborative community-engaged project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is a collaboration with Dr. Laura Kuhl of Northeastern University and Dr. Marla Perez Lugo, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. It examines recent investments in energy transformation in the US and how well these investments align with community priorities, through comparative case studies in West Virginia, Puerto Rico, and Massachusetts. You can read some of early findings from the WV component of this project in a recent piece from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Environmental Governance of Variable Environments in Southern Africa: Beginning with my own doctoral dissertation research in Botswana, this project is focused on questions of environmental governance and climate adaptation in Southern Africa. Findings from this work highlight how top-down governance strategies in variable climates can reduce the adaptive capacity of marginalized communities, with study sites in in Botswana and Namibia.

Transformation in International Climate Adaptation Finance: This project expands my work from Southern Africa to the international scale, based on the recognition that local-level climate adaptation is strongly shaped by higher-level dynamics. This collaborative project (with Dr. Laura Kuhl of Northeastern University) examines the role of climate finance in adaptation policy in the Global South, with a focus on how transformational adaptation is understood and funded. Our findings call into question international finance’s emphasis on techno-managerial and neoliberal economic approaches to adaptation and argue for funding of projects that are locally led and address structural vulnerabilities.

Teaching

I strive to bring my expertise into the classroom to give my students the interdisciplinary tools necessary to understand the social-ecological dimensions of some of the most critical environmental challenges in today’s world. I regularly offer these four courses:

EST 361: History of the American Environmental Movement (Offered every Fall semester)

EST 690: International Environmental Policy Consultancy (Offered every Fall semester)

EST 496/796: Water, Climate & Society (Offered every Spring semester)

EST 605: Qualitative Methods (Offered every Spring semester)

Publications

Shinn, Jamie. 2004. Governing for local livelihoods in transboundary river systems: Insights from the Cubango-Okavango River Basin. Regional Environmental Change 24(120): 1-13.

Shinn, Jamie. 2004. Storytelling in precarious landscapes: Insights from a photovoice project in rural Appalachia. Journal of Political Ecology 31(1). 

Kuhl, Laura, Istiakh Ahmed*, M. Feisal Rahman, Jamie Shinn, Johan Arango-Quiroga*, and Saleemul Huq. 2003. Climate loss-and-damage funding: how to get money to where it’s needed fast. Nature 623(7988): 693-695.

Kuhl, Laura, Jamie E. Shinn, Johan Arango-Quiroga, Istiakh Ahmed, and M. Feisal Rahman. 2023. "The liberal limits to transformation in the Green Climate Fund." Climate and Development (2023): 1-12.

Williamson, Kathryn, Jamie Shinn, Debra Hemler, and Sandra Fallon. 2023. “A Case Study for Climate Change Teacher Professional Development in West Virginia.” The Journal of Sustainability Education 28 (2023): 1-23.   

Kuhl, Laura, and Jamie Shinn. 2022. "Transformational adaptation and country ownership: competing priorities in international adaptation finance." Climate Policy 22.9-10 (2022): 1290-1305.

Caretta, Martina Angela, Rodrigo Fernandez Reynosa, Nicolas Zegre, and Jamie E. Shinn. 2021. “Hydrosocial and social-hydro frameworks: Towards an integrative approach for studying flooding vulnerability in Appalachia.” Frontiers: Water (3): 656417.

Shinn, Jamie E. and Martina Angela Caretta. 2020. “If it wasn't for the faith-based groups, we wouldn't be where we are today”: Flooding response and recovery in Greenbrier County, WV. Southeastern Geographer 60 (3): 235-253.

Shinn, Jamie E. and Arianna Hall-Reinhard. 2019. Emphasizing livelihoods in the study of social-ecological systems: insights from fishing practices in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. South African Geographical Journal 101 (1): 121-139.

LaRocco, Annette Alfina, Jamie E. Shinn, and Kentse Madise. 2019. Reflections on Positionalities in Social Science Fieldwork in Northern Botswana: A Call for Decolonizing Research. Politics & Gender (2019): 1-29.

King, Brian, Jamie E. Shinn, Kayla Yurco, Kenneth R. Young, and Kelley A. Crews. 2019. Political Ecologies of Dynamic Wetlands: Hydrosocial Waterscapes in the Okavango Delta. The Professional Geographer 71 (1): 29-38.

Shinn, Jamie E. 2018. Toward Anticipatory Adaptation: Social-Ecological Transformation in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The Geographical Journal 184(2): 179-191. 

King, Brian, Kayla Yurco, Kenneth R. Young, Kelley A. Crews, Jamie E. Shinn, and Amelia C. Eisenhart. 2018. Livelihood Dynamics Across a Variable Flooding Regime. Human Ecology. 46 (6): 865-874.

Jepson, Wendy, Jessica Budds, Emma Norman, Amber Wutich, Kathleen O'Reilly, Sameer H. Shah, Leila Harris, Jamie Shinn, and Sera Young. 2017. Advancing Water Security for Human Development: A Relational Perspective.  Water Security 1(1): 46-52. 

Wutich, Amber, Jessica Budds, Laura Eichelberger, Jo Geere, Jennifer A. Horney, Wendy Jepson, Emma Norman, Kathleen O'Reilly, Amber Pearson, Sameer H. Shah, Jamie Shinn, Kate Simspon, Chad Staddon, Justin Stohler, Manual P. Teodoro, Sera L. Young. 2017. Diverse methodological approaches to measuring water security. Water Security 1(2): 1-10.

Shinn, Jamie E. 2016. Adaptive Environmental Governance of Changing Social-ecological Systems: Empirical Insights from the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Global Environmental Change. 40: 50-59. 

King, Brian, Jamie E. Shinn, Kenneth R. Young, and Kelley A. Crews. 2016. Fluid Rivers and Rigid Governance in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. Land. 5(2):16. 

Hedberg, Russ, Arielle Hesse, Doug Baldwin, Jase Bernhardt, David Retchless. Jamie E. Shinn. 2016. Preparing Geographers for Interdisciplinary Research: Graduate training at the interface of natural and social science. The Professional Geographer. 2016: 1-10. 

Shinn, Jamie E., Brian King, Kenneth R. Young, and Kelley A. Crews. 2014. Variable adaptations: Micro-politics of environmental displacement in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Geoforum 57: 21–29. 

Shinn, Jamie E., 2014. The rhetoric and reality of community empowerment in coastal conservation: a case study from Menai Bay Conservation Area, Tanzania. African Geographical Review 34 (2): 107-124.