Monica Vasile was a Carson fellow from December 2016 to May 2017, and from July 2018 to February 2019.
Monica Vasile is an environmental anthropologist. She is currently writing her first monograph The Forest Never Ends: Timbermen, Fiefdoms and Bison in the Postsocialist Carpathian Mountains. She is also head of the research group “Romanian Mountain Commons,” which maps and extensively describes contemporary forest and pasture commons across the Carpathian Mountains currently hosted at the Solidarity Laboratory, Bucharest. She has conducted research in the mountainous regions of Romania and is concerned with issues of changing environmental practice, forests, grazing areas, and mountain communities. She has published and presented on themes related to environmental relations in the Carpathian Mountains, both historically and in the present, on land commons, forest extraction, rewilding, and conservation. Monica studied and taught sociology and social anthropology at the University of Bucharest, where she obtained her PhD in 2008. From 2009 to 2013, she was a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle-Saale. In addition to her academic pursuits, Monica worked as a socioeconomic expert for NGO-led nature conservation projects in Romania, which have had direct implications for the lives of Carpathian communities. As a fellow at the RCC, she taught the course “Introduction to Environmental Anthropology” for the Environmental Studies Certificate Program.
RCC Research Project: Associative Environmentality: The Revival of Forest Commons in the Romanian Carpathians
Selected Publications:
- “Formalizing Commons, Registering Rights: The Making of the Forest and Pasture Commons in the Romanian Carpathians from the 19th Century to Post-Socialism.” International Journal of the Commons 12, no. 1 (2018): 170–201.
- “The Vulnerable Bison: Practices and Meanings of Rewilding in the Romanian Carpathians.” Conservation and Society 16, no. 3 (2018): 217–31.
- “The Enlivenment of Institutions: Emotional Work and the Emergence of Contemporary Land Commons in the Carpathian Mountains.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 62, no. 1 (2019).
- with Nicole Bauer and Maria Mondini. “The Attitudes towards Nature, Wilderness and Protected Areas: A Way to Sustainable Stewardship in the South-Western Carpathians.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 61, no. 5–6 (2017): 857–77.