Arid Lands

R. Brooks Jeffery is the Director of the Drachman Institute, the research-based outreach arm of the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (CALA) dedicated to sustainable design and planning. The Drachman Institute acts as a service-learning nexus between community needs and the College’s skills and knowledge in architecture, landscape architecture, and planning with a specific focus on affordable housing, heritage conservation, neighborhood, community & regional planning. He has been a faculty member at the College since 1988 and is also the coordinator of the College's multi-disciplinary graduate certificate program in Heritage Conservation where his teaching, research, and outreach has focused on the preservation of built environments throughout the world. Jeffery has been a principal investigator on numerous grants and contracts from local, regional and national agencies as well as the recipient of awards for his efforts. Among his core disciplinary values is the preservation of the built environment as part of a comprehensive conservation ethic and that the most sustainable buildings are those that already exist.

Dr. Karletta Chief is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Specialist in the Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. As an assistant professor, the goal of her research is to improve our understanding, tools, and predictions of watershed hydrology, unsaturated flow in arid environments, and how natural and human disturbances affect soil hydrology through the use of physically based methods. Dr. Chief research also focuses on how indigenous communities will be affected by climate change and collaborated in an interdisciplinary group of scientists including hydrologists, system dynamic modelers, and social scientists to determine how hydrological models can be improved to identify and mitigate risks to these vulnerable populations. As an extension specialist, she works to bring relevant science to Native American communities in a culturally sensitive manner by providing hydrology expertise, transferring knowledge, assessing information needs, and developing applied science projects.

I have a dual position, split between the Southwest Center and School of Geography and Development. As assistant editor of Journal of the Southwest (published by the Southwest Center), I have worked to build upon the university’s tradition of collaborative investigation and publication with Mexican institutions. JSW also publishes widely across the social sciences and humanities, focusing on northwest Mexico and the greater Southwest. My research and teaching interests range widely, from the geographies of institutions and rural development in Mexico and Latin America, to the connections between everyday life and the broader quest to create spaces for social justice and autonomous environmental politics. I am most concerned with state formation and development as socio-spatial and cultural processes that tie together often antagonistic ideas, places, identities, peoples, and things. During the pre-neoliberal era, Mexican statecraft remained focused on stabilizing meaning and practice around the uneven power dynamics of development and its radical reworkings of space. Following austerity and market liberalization, this role has waned, somewhat. But it is also being reconstituted in ways that simultaneously reinforce and demolish longstanding relationships between the state and countryside. Understanding the changing nature of this connection, and its implications for everyday life and livelihood, drives my research.