PEOPLE Graduate Students

Beth Croucher - Outstanding Graduate Student- Spring 2008

Qualities that earned her this honor

Academic Achievement, evidenced by a 4.0 cumulative 4.0 GPA.

Community service, including: acting as treasurer for Bridge for Indigenous Development and Grassroots Empowerment, a non-profit working to empower alternatives to mainstream conservation and development models by facilitating networking activities of indigenous communities; volunteering for Denver Children’s Advocacy Center, serving children who have been sexually abused, neglected, or traumatized by witnessing violence.

• Collaborative research on the effects of economically-oriented conservation programs on impoverished rural communities in Tanzania. Beth co-authored an article about this research that was published in the on-line journal Conservation and Society in 2007.
• Presentations of this research at the 2007 Research and Creative Activities Symposium at University of Colorado Denver and the 2007 Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting, for which she was named 1st Place Winner of the Valene Smith Prize at the First Annual Tourism Research Poster Competition.

Accolades from those supporting her nomination:

“Beth is the consummate critical thinker. She has the proverbial passion to learn and the intellectual capacity to challenge the status quo. I would consider her one of the two or three most remarkable students I have taught during my twenty-year career at UCD. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that she has transitioned from being an incredibly bright and promising student to a professional colleague.” Steve Koester, Chair, Department of Anthropology

“Over the past four years, [Beth] has pursued her graduate work as a labor of love, always giving it her very best. Just before Beth graduates she will participate in a workshop that I have organized on human issues in biodiversity conservation. She will participate as a professional with relevant experience and expertise in this area. This is the most that any of us can hope for as academics: that the people we train will ultimately graduate from being students to being colleagues. This is a transition that is relatively rare for students in PhD programs. Beth has achieved this distinction in the context of a Master’s program.” Jim Igoe, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

“As a scholar, Beth was able to develop and implement a complex research topic for her Master’s thesis work in Tanzania where she spent five months doing her field work, a testament to her commitment to the field of anthropology. As faculty with active research in Tanzania, I must say that doing field work in Tanzania is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks and it comes with a heavy price. Beth was able to overcome many obstacles including bureaucracy, new cultural settings, and a language barrier to emerge a winner.” Charles Musiba, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

In Beth ’s Own Words:

“One thing that has never failed to intrigue me about my experience as a graduate student at CU Denver is the constant overlap between what I learned in my former professional life and what I have learned since I returned to school. These connections have allowed me to bring a perspective to my work that I believe is different from that of most other students. “The opportunities that have been made available to me by the faculty at CU Denver, opportunities which I never could have envisioned or accomplished on my own, have encouraged me to imagine using my skills and knowledge in ways that until recently I had never considered.”

“I have an interest in exploring the inherent contradictions that exist in interdisciplinary approaches to conservation, but I am equally as interested in the legal versus practical implications of environment management, particularly for people whose lives are most directly impacted by that management. My immediate plans are to acquire more research experience so that I can gain more pragmatic, ‘on-the-ground’ knowledge of how people live in a particular place and why they make the environmental management choices they do.”

Beth has been accepted into the Department of Geography PhD Program at the University of Colorado – Boulder. She will begin her studies Fall '09, concentrating on Environment-Society Interactions with a specific focus on the politics of knowledge in relation to conservation behavior.

Beth along with students and faculty from the College of African Wildlife Management participate in a community meeeting concerning conflicts with the African Wildlife Foundation and Manyara Ranch

 

With local children on Kilimanjaro