Critical Mixed-Methods in Political Ecology

Incorporating ecology has always been one of political ecology's most persistent methodological challenges. The field aspires to understand environments as the outcomes of complex, multi-scalar political processes — yet doing so often requires engaging positivist methods like GIS and inferential statistics that sit uneasily alongside its post-positivist commitments. The result is a productive but undertheorized tension that most researchers navigate in practice without a shared framework to draw on.

In this collaborative project with Prof. Deborah Martin, we take that tension seriously as a theoretical problem. Drawing on advances in critical mixed-methods research, we systematize what political ecology has already accomplished at this methodological frontier and propose a framework for integrating ecological and political analysis in ways that are both rigorous and epistemologically coherent.