Emma Bixler is a third-year doctoral candidate at The Fletcher School Tufts University, and the 2026 recipient of the World Peace Research Fellowship funded by the WPF and administered through the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security, the grant supports pre-doctoral research and is open to doctoral candidates at The Fletcher School. Below, she is interview by Bridget Conley, WPF’s Research Director.
Bridget Conley: Congratulations on winning the World Peace Foundation/Leir Institute Doctoral Research Support Grant!
Emma Bixler: Thank you so much.
Bridget Conley: What is the topic of your research?
Emma Bixler: I am interested in looking at issues of environmental security and ecological security as a part of the larger human security framework and as feminist imperatives. I think about this work within the field of feminist political ecology — thinking about how environmental issues are socially and politically constructed. That, in a broad sense, is the type of research that I’m looking at.
Bridget Conley: When you say “environmental security,” how do you think of those two terms together?
Emma Bixler: You can’t have human security or more-than-human security without thinking about environmental security and ecological security. It’s the physical, and material and really spiritual quality of places and spaces, the integrity, availability, diversity of resources. So, I think of environmental security as being a way to look at security holistically and as a way to enable the goals of human security, of human dignity.
Bridget Conley: Insecurity in this sense that you’re using it, or in the sense that it’s used in human security, is opposed to hard security or military security, which is concerned with identifying and developing tools, systems and policies to respond to threats. It’s like a risk kind of model. When I think of human security, it’s concerned with thinking about human relationships, and what are the risks and threats to thriving. So ecological security then moves us one step in a different direction to think about the ecological systems in which we all live in. Is that the sense of security that you’re thinking of?
Emma Bixler: It is, and I like that framing. It gets me thinking about relationships. Human security, in many ways, is about human relationships, and I think environmental security is about humans’ relationship with the environment and with more-than human life. I like thinking about environmental security as this kind of radical concept that helps us reconsider or revisit alternative ways to relating to nature, ways that are reciprocal, ways that are transformative, and that enable human and more than human life far into the future.
Bridget Conley: What does feminist theory or feminist research methodologies add to this mix?
Emma Bixler: So, to me, using a feminist methodology means being really intentional about who I talk to, whether that person is an expert, a consultant, an activist. It changes how I think about knowledge and what is considered to be knowledge. You know, am I reading something or talking to a scientific expert? Are we thinking about indigenous knowledge? It means really opening up the idea of what is considered knowledge, especially in the academic space. We can get boxed into one type of knowledge or one way in which we accept knowledge, and so taking and using feminist methodology is expanding this idea of what constitutes knowledge and what’s acceptable within the academic space.
It’s also thinking about structural factors that have led to and continue to drive and fuel ecological insecurity. You can’t really think about feminist methodology without also thinking about decolonial methodology, for example. It goes all the way down to how I’m doing my literature reviews and how I’m considering underlying systems and causes. Going back to the knowledge comment, it’s also “the literature” itself. Going beyond just scholarship and considering other forms of documentation, journalism, art as all part of this larger project. That’s a form of feminist methodology.
Bridget Conley: As you take on these huge areas of concern, how are you focusing them in your work?
Emma Bixler: I do have a proposed case study for my project. The specific issue within the field of feminist political ecology that I’m focusing on is extractivism, and I’m thinking of extractivism in a few different ways. One would be natural resource extraction, so these are issues like mining, deforestation. I consider land dispossession a form of extraction, but also thinking about how structural force forces have led to the extraction of bodies or the extraction of labor. So, this is the area within environmental security and feminist political ecology that I’m focusing on. I’m interested in looking at this issue specifically within Tunisia.
My case study looks at phosphate mining and processing within two regions of Tunisia. I’m thinking about how civil society has responded to and resisted extractivism in Gafsa, the mining basin, and the Gulf of Gabès, and really considering how relations of power, of gender, and conceptions of justice have helped or have shaped these forms of resistance.
Just to give you a little bit of background, phosphate mining and processing is a state-sponsored form of extraction. In 2008, two years before the uprising in Tunisia — the beginning of the Arab Spring – there were protests in the Gafsa Mining Basin against the Compagnie des Phosphates de Gafsa due to regional unemployment, underdevelopment, and discontent over environmental factors.
We’re now seeing, over the last 15 years or so, the Stop Pollution campaign, which is in response to the pollution that’s generated by chemical processing in Gabès. This is really horrific pollution, air pollution, sea pollution — it causes horrific health consequences for human beings and has destroyed the marine ecological environment along the coast. So, there are multiple dimensions to this case, but there is active resistance in response. That’s really important to me, when looking at a case of extractivism, it is not just looking at the consequences of the impacts but also thinking about how people are responding and resisting in this in these instances.
Bridget Conley: Oh, that’s super interesting. Where are you in the research process now?
Emma Bixler: I have not yet defended my proposal. I am in the middle stages of building that out. I’m also developing my network. I’ve had some informal conversations with activists in this space, with Tunisian experts on climate and on extractivism. So, I’m having those conversations simultaneous to building out my proposal, which I hope to defend in the winter. I anticipate doing field work in the spring, and that would be largely qualitative. Interviewing and working with researchers and activists in this space.
Bridget Conley: And is that how this dissertation award will support your work?
Emma Bixler: Yeah, so I have this funding set aside to support my field work. Of course, you know it’s helpful in the networking phase as well, but I anticipate using it specifically to do fieldwork for this project.
Bridget Conley: How did you get interested in this topic?
Emma Bixler: I knew I wanted to study feminist international relations theory when I came to Fletcher for my master’s a few years ago, but I wasn’t sure where within that field I would fall, like what my niche would be. There were a few things that led me on this path. A few different classes. One was thinking about proportionality and environmental proportionality within International Humanitarian Law, and that’s a class that I took with Professor Dannenbaum. Another was your Critical IR Theory class, when we read specifically Gustavo García-López on the commons and environmental justice. And at the same time, I was taking a class with Professor Kimberly Theidon, called Environmental Humanities. And through these various classes, I saw these concepts come together of gender justice, environmental justice, environmental security, and that was what I focused my master’s thesis on, and how I’ve now come to focus on this for my dissertation.
Bridget Conley: How did you come to focus on Tunisia?
Emma Bixler: I lived and worked in Benin for two years as a part of the Peace Corps, where I taught English. That experience changed my life and really solidified for me that I wanted to do something in international affairs and with gender justice. I just wasn’t sure what. I did my master’s thesis in Kenya and Tanzania, looking at environmental movements, specifically women-led movements. But when thinking about this idea of extractivism, you could really look at this in many places. I had some things to consider. You know, where do I have regional expertise, if I could call it that yet. What are my language abilities? What current projects am I working on? And through a current project, along with some of those other considerations, I started looking at the issue of mining in Tunisia, and that’s when all these multiple dimensions came into play. You can think about, this as a case of severe ecological impacts. You could think about this in terms of resistance and how environmental degradation can lead to resistance. There are also, I would argue, gaps in the literature on how these are gendered issues. How to look at this issue using a feminist political ecology lens, using ecofeminism to think through these things. So that’s how I landed on this case specifically, and also the larger topic.
Bridget Conley: That’s great. I look forward to seeing how your work develops. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
