Jacqueline Vadjunec
Professor, DGES and Associate Director, IREES
Email: jvadjunec@ou.edu
Jacqueline Vadjunec is a human-environment geographer specializing in community resilience, sustainable agriculture and forestry, and land-use / land-cover change (LULCC). Jacqueline’s research draws on and contributes to natural resource management/governance theory, cultural and political ecology (CAPE), land system science (LSS), Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK) and (geospatial) research ethics.
Jacqueline’s research style is team-based, community-driven, transdisciplinary and convergent in nature, and mixed methods and participatory in approach. Having worked extensively with Native, rural, and other marginalized groups in the Americas, Jacqueline strives to practice ethical, coproduced community-based research. She has worked extensively on sustainability issues with smallholder agriculturalists, nontimber forest producers, and new social movements in the Brazilian Amazon and Chiapas, Mexico. In the United States, Jacqueline is part of a long-term, multi-institutional project related to Dust Bowl survivors, heritage family farm, and socio-ecological resilience in the grasslands of the Southern Great Plains (SGP). For more about here work, see here.
Between 2018-2020 Jacqueline was a visiting scientist (rotator) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the Human Environment and Geographic Sciences (HEGS) Program. She was also involved in many cross-directorate programs including, Dynamics of Integrated Socio- Environmental Systems (DISES), Coastlines and People (CoPe), Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS), Signals in the Soil (SiTs), Navigating the New Arctic (NNA), and COVID-19 RAPIDS. In 2020, she received the National Special Service Award in recognition for her service.
Jacqueline earned a PhD and MA in Geography from Clark University in Worcester, MA. She earned a BA in Geography and English from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. Before arriving at OU in Fall 2023, she was a professor of Geography at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK from 2007-2023, where she maintains affiliate status. While there she served as the faculty fellow for community engagement (2017-2018), and the faculty fellow for strategic research initiatives on campus (2022-2023). Jacqueline is passionate about working on the ground with communities in Oklahoma and beyond.
