Melanie Wiber (Professor)

Current Research Publications Pictures

      Dr. Melanie G. Wiber joined the University of New Brunswick in 1987 and has been Full Professor of Anthropology since 1995. She is on sabbatical beginning July 2008.

      Her research focuses on economic and legal anthropology, natural resource management, the fisheries, and gender issues. UNB has granted her two Merit Awards (1998, 2006), and a Research Professorship (2003). She is a board member for the International Commission on Legal Pluralism (1999 to the present), and has served as Commission Secretariat (2001-2006). For the past six years she has been a regular visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany). She has received numerous national and international research grants, including SSHRC standard research, conference and workshop grants, Max Planck funding, and visiting scholar grants from Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

     Her recent publications have focused on new forms of property rights in quota management systems and in genetics, cultural property, community-based management in the fisheries, and gender issues.

     Dr. Wiber is currently involved in a five-year Coastal CURA (Community and University Research Alliance) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is collaborating with Dr. Tony Charles (Principal Investigator, SMU), and other team members, on integrated coastal management (see www.coastalcura.ca). Among other responsibilities on this project, Dr. Wiber will supervise some of the Masters and Doctoral students funded by the CURA.

     In addition, Dr. Wiber is heading up a Working Group on the Socio-Economics of Integrated Management for the Oceans Management Research Network (OMRN) that is collaboratively funded by SSHRC and the DFO).