Environmental Dimensions of Human Stress, Adaptation, and Resilience

This research project will address the dynamics of stress in human societies, investigating the production, circulation, valencies, and effects of diverse stresses upon human well-being within distinct environments.
Research will work to chart connections between the perception and effects of stresses on the individual, and the production of stress through macro level societal and environmental variables, considering patterns of resource use, narratives of social and environmental futures, and developmental trajectories.
Research will contribute to understandings of the role of stress in human evolution and environmental adaptation/maladaptation by interrogating the complex dynamics and frictions through which stresses emerge in interactions between individual, society and environment. Research will help clarify techniques and strategies of adaptation and resilience to societal and environmental stresses, contributing to understandings of environments that are supportive of human well-being at the orders of individual, society, and species. Diverse cultural understandings of stress will be taken into consideration throughout, questioning the relevance of the term for explaining societal and environmental pressures within distinct contexts.
Decisions about research sites for ethnographic enquiry are pending the arrangement of alternative supervision necessitated by staff resignation