Eileen Smith-Cavros

Eileen Smith-Cavros, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor who teaches sociology and anthropology classes in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies. Previously, she worked at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center in Florida as Head Naturalist and in Zion National Park, Utah, for the Zion Natural History Association, where she was the founding Director of the Zion Canyon Field Institute (ZCFI). ZCFI provided outdoor instruction in areas including geology, Native American basket-weaving, petroglyphs, photography, edible plants, bats, and botanical illustration, as well as hands-on service-learning projects on archaeology and oral history. She has written in the area of environmental sociology in the bookPioneer Voices of Zion Canyon and the closing chapter ofA Zion Canyon Reader. Smith-Cavros has published articles in national and international academic journals on African-American churchgoers and the environment including a visual anthropology project centering around social justice and local participants' photography in Miami's historic Overtown neighborhood.

Dr. Smith-Cavros has also published her field research (performed with an interdisciplinary and international team) among campesinos in Veracruz, Mexico, who once hunted manatees and she filmed and co-wrote the accompanying anthropological documentary Laguna Manati: Ayer y Hoy. The film was chosen as part of the Green Unplugged international online film festival. She has also published research concerning infertility from medical sociology perspectives in a peer-reviewed academic article as well as a book co-authored with Dr. Ellen Miller,The Infertility Challenge. She recently co-authored a law journal article on lesbian lawyers and issues of identity in South Florida. Her ongoing research projects include: examining interactions between spirituality and healthcare access among rural elders in the village of Agate, Ghana (with Dr. Joyce Avotri-Wuaku), and an analysis in rural Utah of households who have lived completely off the municipal utility power grid.