Abstract
When Charles Wagley moved from Columbia University to the University of Florida (UF) in 1972, he established the Tropical South America Program. In this program he began an enduring legacy at UF of interdisciplinarity, collaborative research and training focused on the problems and solutions of tropical development, and support for students as future leaders. Reaching out to agricultural researchers and other social science disciplines, Wagley later co-founded and directed the Amazon Research and Training Program (ARTP), and remained active even after his retirement in 1983. The ARTP built on Wagley's strategy of supporting student research and building collaboration with partners in Latin America, and innovated in bringing in visiting professors from different disciplines, developing new interdisciplinary courses, and networking among Amazonian scholars in different countries. Wagley's most lasting contribution is the Tropical Conservation and Development (TCD) program, which grew out of the ARTP to become an internationally-recognized interdisciplinary graduate program focused on the intersection between biodiversity conservation and the well-being of people in the tropical world. Drawing on participation from over 100 faculty affiliates in 27 academic units at UF, since 1980 the ARTP and TCD programs have trained over 400 graduate students from two dozen countries.
Highlights
When Charles Wagley moved from Columbia University to the University of Florida (UF) in 1972, he established the Tropical South America Program
The position as UF Graduate Research Professor allowed him time to teach, write and research as he saw fit, and he used that opportunity to plant the seeds of a major interdisciplinary research and training program at the University of Florida that can rightly be attributed to his leadership and example
Wagley’s interdisciplinary leadership already had been demonstrated in his participation as one of the founders of the interdisciplinary Latin American Studies Association, and his commitment to collaborative projects in Brazil as well as other Latin American countries. He did not see himself as an applied anthropologist (Harris, 1990, p. 2), Wagley was committed to humanist analyses that produced practical solutions to social problems, especially in the development of tropical areas
Summary
The role of a planned agroforestry system in Amazon urban resettlement: a case study of the “Pólo Municipal de Produção Agroflorestal” of Acre, Brazil
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