International Program - Staff Profiles

Susannah McCandless, International Program Director

Susannah is a geographer and political ecologist who completed her PhD at Clark University in Massachusetts, USA in 2010. Her fieldwork in the U.S. and Latin America focuses on questions of conservation of privately-held land and the possibility that it may function as a commons; and how gender, race, and ethnicity affect rights of access and movement. She has taught human geography at the University of Vermont, environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and worked formally and informally with organizations focused on land reform, community forestry, ethnbiology, environmental justice, and migrant farmworkers. Raised in Vermont, USA, Susannah is interested in the critical intersections between viable landscapes and just human livelihoods. Susannah is a native speaker of English, and also speaks Spanish and French.

Emily Caruso, Regional Programmes Director

Emily completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of Kent (UK) in January 2012. Her research, carried out among the Ashaninka - an indigenous Amazonian people living in Eastern Peru - explored the relationship between their concepts of selfhood and alterity, and their modes of relating with the nation-state, conservation and development projects, and NGOs. She has a particular interest in the practices and politics of formal conservation interventions, indigenous peoples’ engagements with the latter, and community-based conservation. Since 2002, she has worked with various international NGOs supporting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights, and since 2007, she has accompanied Ashaninka federations in their daily operations and broader political struggles. Emily is a native English speaker, and fluent in Italian, French and Spanish.

Marina Aman Sham, Communications Coordinator (Outreach)

Marina first began working with local communities in 2002 during her involvement in a project focusing on rural women entrepreneurship in her home state of Sabah (Malaysia), on the island of Borneo. The project, a government-led initiative, aimed to increase the income generation potential of rural women through the development of, amongst others, local handicraft and traditional produce. Marina received a degree in Public Relations and Marketing from Curtin University in Western Australia in 2007. Since then, her energy has focused primarily in conservation, working on awareness, education and marketing projects locally. Marina is a native Sabahan who speaks English and Bahasa Malaysia.