By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

Susanna Hecht was honored with awards from the Association of American Geographers (AAA) and the Latin American Studies Association, while colleague Shaina Potts received an AAA book award for her first monograph.

UCLA International Institute, May 2, 2025 — The research of two International Institute scholars, Susanna Hecht and Shaina Potts, was recently honored by academic associations of their peers. Both scholars are geographers and their awards highlight the transformative insights that the field of geography brings to international studies, ranging from political ecology and history to global legal and financial institutions and practices.

Susanna Hecht and political ecology

Hecht, director of the Center for Brazilian Studies and professor of urban studies at both the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, received the 2025 Distinguished Career Award from the Cultural Anthropology and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in late March.

“I was delighted to receive this award from the AAG and am humbled by the broad support of my peers,” said Hecht. “I’ll be giving a major plenary as a result of this award next year on ‘Not all Anthropocenes are the Same.’

“The point of the lecture (still a year away!) is that we have some agency about the nature of the possible futures, even though these are increasingly… moving in directions that have potentially catastrophically dangerous outcomes. There are multiple tipping points; it may be that the adaptations come from surprising sources.”

Hecht has published widely on the Amazon rainforest for over 30 years and received the Stanley Bruun Award for Creativity in Geography from the AAG in 2023. Among her many publications are “Fate of the Forest: Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon” (1989) and the award-winning “Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha” (2013).

“The questions of political ecology are only becoming more widespread as debates about environmental futures and environmental vulnerabilities — and how to respond to them and how to recover from them — become more acute,” related the UCLA professor.

“What has been most interesting about political ecology and cultural anthropology is its ability to absorb a vast array of methodological approaches — and scientific, social scientific, historical and humanities insights — into competing understandings of the dynamics of change that we are undergoing at this time,” she continued, “History, philosophy, literature, film and other humanities have a lot to say that help illuminate our environmental questions and understandings.”

“Another dimension of political ecology,” continued Hecht, “has been its use of participatory practices, indigenous knowledge systems and citizens scientists as part of a larger engagement in understanding the dynamics of change that we are now confronting.”

In late May, Hecht will receive another academic honor: the Best Article Prize of 2024, awarded by the Environmental Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She and her co-author, Damian Clavel of Zurich University, will be honored for “Colonial Exiles: The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815–1821” (Hispanic American Historical Review [2024] 104 [4]: 551–86).

“The Tambora volcanic explosion in Indonesia in 1815 had widespread climatic effects,” explained Hecht. “Although short term, these impacts were highly destabilizing to the northern hemisphere, causing subsistence crises from China and India to Europe and the U.S., but especially in Switzerland, where it dovetailed with the collapse of Swiss agrarian economies.”

Hecht pointed out that far graver displacements were occurring in Europe at the time due to the Napoleonic wars. “This caused the royal house of Portugal to flee Europe and reestablish itself in Brazil. Anxious about recent slave uprisings (in Haiti, for example), the Portuguese regime sponsored Swiss migration to Brazil and the establishment of the settlement of Novo Friburgo with these climate refugees.

“Coupled with emergent racial ideologies, this foundational Swiss population would fuel Brazil’s later ideological emphasis of ‘whitening’ and support for massive white European immigration at the turn of the 20th century,” she reflected. “The paper illuminates how distant climate disruptions, even short term, can have long impacts and change societies in unanticipated ways.”

Shaina Potts brings a geographic lens to law and financial flows

An economic, legal and political geographer with a focus on international political economy, Potts is associate professor in the department of geography and the International Institute, where she teaches regularly in its global studies program. She is currently working on a new project that examines the extraction and supply chains of minerals critical to the green transition.

Potts recently received the 2025 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography from the American Association of Geographers for her first monograph, “Judicial Territory: Law, Capital and the Expansion of American Empire” (Duke, 2024).

“I was truly honored to receive this award from the AAG,” said Potts. “I think a geographical perspective opens up crucial but often unasked questions about how law operates. I will be delighted if the book contributes to pushing the conversation between geographers and legal scholars further.”

As the AAG announcement of Pott’s award noted, “Potts takes a subject which has typically been the exclusive domain of legal scholarship and convincingly demonstrates that it must be treated as a fundamentally geographic question, revealing a hidden map of legal rulings and capital flows which in many ways better explains the state of the world today than the political map of distinctly bordered sovereign nations.”

Geography as a tool for understanding global affairs

“Beyond the ‘high school geography’ of where rivers, capitals of countries, and so on are located, the basic topic of geography is the interaction of people with place, the construction of those places as an outcome of ideas, practices and the actions of the environment itself on the conditions of possibility,” reflected Hecht.

“As geography is such an integrated and integrative discipline, it’s especially useful in international studies for understanding the differences between places as amalgamations of a variety of the forces that work themselves out differently in different places and times, but also how similar challenges within national spatial contexts unfold.

“Geographies are much more historical, political and cultural than is usually recognized, and are realms of shifting cartographies (see, for example, the new ‘Gulf of America’),” she observed. “While it has been a habit of modernity to imagine that we write humanity’s history on the surface of the planet, in fact, spatialities and environments also write us.”

Potts added, “To my mind, perhaps the core contribution of geographical analysis (which, of course, does not only come from geographers!) is to always foreground questions of unevenness and differentiation, on the one hand, and relationality, on the other.

“Neither the problems nor the successes of any society can be understood apart from that society’s position within a complex, interconnected and unequal world order,” she continued. “Moreover, geographers are particularly and increasingly adept at thinking across scales, connecting the very small-scale with the macro, without seeing one as dominant.

“By making us question many of our core common-sense spatial categories — territory, border, scale, nation, region, place, etc. — geography also troubles taken-for-granted ideas about the way political, economic and cultural forces operate,” said Potts, “pushing us to think about how material processes so often complicate these categories and the power of our own spatial metaphors in both shaping and obscuring important phenomena.”

Published: Friday, May 2, 2025