It is our pleasure to announce the appointment of Dr Leila Harris as Associate Director of the Program on Water Governance. Dr Harris brings a wealth of international, interdisciplinary research experience on water, gender, and the environment. We look forward to her playing a leading role in the Program’s international work.
Welcome, Leila!
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Leila Harris is currently Assistant Professor with the Institute of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability, and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her work examines social, cultural and political-economic dimensions of environmental and resource issues, especially in developing contexts. She comes to the Program on Water Governance with long held interest in water politics and governance, with much of her earlier work highlighting water politics, use, and access associated with large-scale transformations of the upper Tigris-Euphrates basin as part of Turkey’s GAP project. Leila has analyzed a range of issues linked to these ongoing changes, from gender and ethnic inequalities in relation to water use and access, to scalar narratives, to linkages between water-related development and state building in the politically marginalized southeastern Anatolia region. With respect to water governance, she is interested in comparative evaluation of recent water governance trends across sites, from democratized water governance, to privatization and commodification trends, with particular interest in these processes in South Africa, Ghana and Turkey. With funding from SSHRC, UBC’s Bridge program, and other sources, Leila is also working with students researching comparative water governance in Africa; issues related to multiple use water in Bolivia; gender and wastewater management in Buenos Aires; and gender and fisheries in the Philippines.