Scott Freeman
Senior Professorial Lecturer
School of International Service
American University 

Through a lens of critical political ecology, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on soil conservation, essential oil production, agricultural labor, and coffee cooperatives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

My earlier work examined the political economy and imaginary of the vetiver essential oil industry in Haiti, arguing for a critical understanding of the production of ignorance as a facet of extractive global industries. 

Recently, I have established a line of inquiry around aid projects and the regimes of labor that support aid projects. This research examines the aid industry as a market for projects and theorizes the ways in which recipients of aid contribute valuable and uncompensated labor to the production successful projects.

I'm currently thinking through what a social analysis of soil reveals about conservation (and development) writ large. My book manuscript, “The Tyranny of Projects: Aid and The Politics of Soil in Haiti,” is an analysis of the way that aid projects have come to organize and orient aid practice. Through an examination of the historical genealogy of soil conservation interventions and the rise of the aid “project” as an administrative unit, the book theorizes the ways in which the failures of aid in Haiti exist alongside the production of successful project reports.