Scott Freeman

Assistant Professor, School of International Service, American University 

I examine aid projects, extractive industry, agricultural labor, and aid induced displacement and remedy. Through a lens of critical political ecology, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and to a lesser extent, in Costa Rica.

My early work examined the political economy and imaginary of the vetiver essential oil industry in Haiti, arguing for a critical understanding of the production of ignorance as a facet of extractive global industries. I then established a line of inquiry around aid projects and the regimes of labor that support aid projects. This research examines the aid industry as a market for projects and theorizes the ways in which recipients of aid contribute valuable and uncompensated labor to the production of successful projects. As a way to investigate the bureaucracy, I have looked historically at what a social analysis of soil reveals about conservation (and development) writ large.

I am now collaborating with grassroots groups in Haiti and their international legal allies as they fight for remedy after development induced displacement. Using remote participatory ethnographic methods we are monitoring remedy from international financial institutions, and understanding how displacement and remedy are affecting the lives and livelihoods of Haitians. Out of this project has risen a collaborative initiative to prevent land grabs by using social science and legal advocacy in northern Haiti.

Throughout all of this research, I have been concerned with extractive industries in the region. In addition to my early work on vetiver, this led me to look at pineapple production in Costa Rica, and the impacts of contemporary plantation economies on smallholding farmers. 

All along the way, my work has been defined by ethnographic research with smallholding farmers in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. I have looked at how rotational labor groups in Haiti and the Dominican Republic constitute counter-plantation practices, and how grassroots groups in the countryside are using agroecology to produce environmental, agricultural, and economic well being.  

My work has appeared in the journals World Development, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation, and Chantiers (Haiti). I have appeared on MSNBC and Reuters. 

• Faculty page at American University

• CV

• Google Scholar