Pete Andrews, JoAnn's PhD advisor, asked me to post the following to the list, which highlights her extraordinary life and the many worlds and peoples she touched.. Regards, Jeremy
JoAnn Carmin 18 July 2014 It is with deep sadness that we report the death of Professor JoAnn Carmin, our valued colleague, collaborator and friend, on July 15, 2014 of complications from advanced breast cancer. She had been fighting cancer for years, bravely and without self-pity through many treatments and much suffering, and continued her immensely productive work and mentoring of her students to the end. Her courage, endurance and continued commitment to her work during her battle with cancer were extraordinary. JoAnn was an Associate Professor at MIT in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and conducted research around the world on environmental governance, policy and most recently on climate adaptation at the local level. She was a leading scholar and top global expert, called upon for expertise by the World Bank, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global league of cities addressing climate change (ICLEI) and other major institutions. Most recently she was a lead co-author of an excellent chapter on adaptation for the American Sociological Association's Task Force on Climate Change, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. JoAnn earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees at Cornell University in management and organizational theory, where she took an early interest in the study of environmental citizen organizations and movements, environmental governance and environmental justice. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999, and while there she developed a particular interest in local environmental politics and the many citizen environmental movements emerging in post-Communist Eastern Europe, beginning with extensive field work in the newly independent Czech Republic. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Professor Richard (Pete) Andrews, was an early and important contribution to understanding of environmental movements and local governance in the Czech Republic, and began a substantial continuing research program expanding this work to the rest of post-Communist eastern Europe. She taught first at Virginia Tech, and then at MIT, where she rose to the rank of tenured associate professor. She also was Director of the Program on Environmental Governance and Sustainability in MIT's Center for International Studies, and gave strong leadership to the department's graduate programs. >From the beginning of her graduate studies JoAnn showed concern for the many >ways in which vulnerable groups are most impacted by environmental burdens, >and she spent much of her career studying community responses to environmental >inequalities. Her work explored the strategies and tactics used by >environmental NGOs and environmental justice activists so that marginalized >groups could have more meaningful participation in decisions that impact their >land and territories. Among many places, her research took her to the gold >mines of Eastern Europe, in places such as Rosia Montana in Romania. She did >not call herself a scholar activist, but she was very much one, caring deeply >about environmental justice and giving voice to vulnerable populations in her >many articles and books. At MIT JoAnn became one of the early scholars to study the emerging responses of cities around the world to global climate change. At a time when both policy and academic discussions were centered almost exclusively on mitigating climate change by reducing carbon emissions, she took the risk of focusing on urban adaptation to climate change, one of the most important issues of the 21st century for cities around the world, whether or not mitigation efforts are successful. In just a few years she pioneered a new field, including surveys of municipal governments around the world as well as case-study fieldwork on the initiatives of local governments on five continents. By the time of her death she was one of the world's leading experts on urban policies for adapting to the growing risks of climate change. She served as lead author of the report of Working Group II of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (released in 2014), and coordinating lead author of the urban technical report for the 2011-12 United States National Climate Assessment, as Associate Editor of Urban Climate, and on the boards of many professional journals and scholarly organizations. In 2011-2013 she was awarded a prestigious Abe Fellowship to study in Japan; she also was awarded visiting research fellowships at Yale, Duke, and the Prague University of Economics. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
