Dr. Leslie Acton
Assistant Professor
Bio
Dr. Leslie Acton is an Assistant Professor of Coastal Sciences at The University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Lab. She is a human geographer and studies human-environment relationships across space and scale. She draws on human geography, political ecology, and common-pool resource theory to examine how ocean policy is negotiated and created and how it impacts stakeholders and communities. Her recent research focuses on large-scale oceans conservation in the high seas and offshore Bermuda and Hawai‘i. Prior to joining the Gulf Coast Research Lab, she completed her PhD at Duke University and was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Colorado State University.
- Marine Science and Conservation (PHD) - Duke University (2017)
- Coastal Environmental Management (MEM) - Duke University (2012)
- What is the Sargasso Sea? The problem of fixing space in a fluid ocean, Political Geography, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.11.004
- Embracing conceptual diversity to integrate power and institutional analysis: Introducing a relational typology, International Journal of the Commons, 2018
- Conceptualizing social outcomes of large marine protected areas, Coastal management, 2017
- Toward a social science research agenda for large marine protected areas, Conservation Letters, 2016
- Network environmentalism: Citizen scientists as agents for environmental advocacy, Global Environmental Change, 2014
- American Association of Geographers
- International Studies Association