Karen Eugenie Rignall

Professional Biography

Dr. Rignall is a cultural anthropologist specializing in issues of resource access and control in North Africa and the central Appalachian region of the US. Her research and community-engaged work addresses just energy and economic transitions in rural mountain zones, with a focus on agrarian change, rural civic infrastructure and political dynamics, land rights, and natural resource governance. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork and multi-disciplinary collaborations informed by critical agrarian studies, political ecology, economics and development studies, and critical energy studies. Her award-winning 2021 book, An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis (Cornell University Press), documents land conflict, agrarian change, and the politics of the commons in Morocco’s southeastern periphery. Longstanding partnerships with an engaged research initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation (2021-2025), comparing the social and political dynamics of copper mining and utility-scale solar energy in southeastern Morocco. This work continues with  with continuing research aimed at establishing a natural resource observatory in the country. 

Ongoing collaborative work on just energy and economic transition in the Appalachian US also addresses the legacy of extraction for energy communities, supporting grassroots networks rooted in rural communities and their visions for vibrant, egalitarian futures. Central to this engaged work in Eastern Kentucky is intergenerational collaboration with community members, bringing in storytelling, creative, expression, and other activities dreamed up by the youth and community partners who guide our efforts.

These commitments to engagement, collaboration, and a just transition extend to Dr. Rignall’s teaching and advising. She serves on the steering committee for the Sustainable Agriculture and Community Food Systems and mentors students across the university and beyond. Dr. Rignall teaches courses on the social dynamics of community, social inequality, community engagement and development, and critical participatory action research approaches.