Dr. Georgia Hart-Fredeluces is an ethnoecologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Languages at Idaho State University. She received her PhD in Botany with an emphasis in ethnoecology from the University of Hawaii in 2019. She specializes in studying contemporary environmental caretaking relationships between people and nature with an emphasis on the relationships of local and Indigenous Peoples to culturally-significant plants. Her research spans the social and natural sciences to explore intertwined social, political, emotional, and ecological factors that facilitate and impede morally and spiritually-based relationships to plants, and to understand how these relationships have been sustained through European colonialism.
Her recent work has been focused in southern Idaho and the Philippines. From January-June 2024, she was an U.S. Fulbright Scholar and Visiting International Professor in the graduate school at Sorsogon State University where she co-taught a biology course and conducted research on smallholder farmer caretaking relationships to pili trees. She employs interviews and surveys, as well as ecological field methods to answer research questions related to social-ecological resilience and the social, political, and ecological implications of plant caretaking. She is also currently research personnel on a U.S. National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, “Idaho Community-engaged Resilience for Energy-Water Systems” (ICREWS) where she examines how local knowledge and diverse ways of knowing can support equitable and resilient energy-water futures in Idaho.
Her research engages with topics including Indigenous food sovereignty, Indigenous Ecologies, more-than-human qualitative methods, emotional geographies, future imaginaries, plant demography, ethnobotany, cultural models of the environment, and the science of community engagement.