Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

Faculty Fellow

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Richard Saunders is associate professor in the Department of Politics in York's Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. Prior to joining to York in 2002, he lived for two decades in Southern Africa, where he worked as a journalist and researcher with community-based and not-for-profit organizations. He still maintains strong research links with academic and civil society researchers in East and Southern Africa and has drawn on these connections to support the work of current graduate students to facilitate research collaborations between York and African partners. Richard’s research and supervision areas involve themes of state-society relations in the Global South in the contemporary period of neoliberal globalization. A recurring theme of his work involves the innovative forms of resistance and "compliance: mounted by social constituencies in the face of pressures associated with neoliberal restructuring, including alternative approaches to community health, and challenges to negative public health impacts of key industries, notably the extractives sector. Since the 1990s, Richard’s academic and civil society research has explored the changing nature of the Southern state, the rise of non-state social actors in the shaping of policy discourses, and the resulting emergence of alternative policy strategies and governance mechanisms.

Research keywords:

Resource governance; mining; East and Southern Africa; community health; environment

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