Meryl Shriver-Rice, Ph.D., R.P.A
Meryl Shriver-Rice is a Research Manager for the Seminole Tribe of Florida and director of the Coastal Heritage at Risk Taskforce (CHART). Prior to taking a role with SToF she was an assistant professor in the department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and Director of Research at the Institute of American Indian Studies Museum. She is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist and archaeologist with expertise in decolonial ethics, ethnobiology, public anthropology, environmental justice, and community-based participatory research.
Her research focuses on how diverse human-environment interactions reveal the ways that people understand, value, and relate to other species and their surrounding environments. In particular, her research has examined how sociocultural concepts of belonging and heritage are historically grounded and entangled with ecological knowledge, inter-generational experiences with landscape, and environmental management strategies.
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CURRENT RESEARCH
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She is principal investigator (PI) of
1.The Endangered inter-generational knowledge and practice for Black Seminole descendants of Andros island project in partnership with the Antiquities, Monuments, and Museums Corporation (AMMC, the national museum of The Bahamas) and The Bahamas Ministry of Education (The British Museum's Endangered Material Knowledge Programme grant).
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2. Visual Interventions and the Climate Crisis: Researching Environmental Justice through Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Climate Impacts in Seggiano (with co-I Hunter Vaughan. Participatory Research Program grant, University of Cambridge).
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3. The decolonial public anthropology project Untold Stories at Risk: Coastal Heritage, Site Risk Assessment, and Educational Outreach (ULINK Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge grant), which examines Black, Indigenous, and LatinX histories as part of the Coastal Heritage at Risk Taskforce (CHART).
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Her current book Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying: From Biocultural Landscapes at Risk to Archiving the Dead (with anthropologist Sarah Hiepler, Wiley Blackwell, 2026) examines decolonial approaches to digital data use and re-storying interventions within wildlife conservation efforts, heritage storytelling, community-based outreach, museum and park archival strategies and interpretation, and public exhibition of the dead.
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INTERDISCIPLINARY BACKGROUND
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From 2016-2023 she taught only graduate students in environmental studies. She has advised master’s and doctoral students in interdisciplinary environmental social science research across such various disciplines as ethnobiology, Indigenous studies, decolonial climate resilience strategies, shark science, ecology, biogeography, ethnobotany, historical ecology, and marine science at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy where she also designed and taught all core courses for the master's program in Environment, Culture, and Media at the University of Miami.
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Dr. Shriver-Rice has served as a grant reviewer for Cultural and Community Resilience panel (CCR) for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), served on the faculty working group that founded the Native American and Global Indigenous Studies (NAGIS) program at UMiami, is a member of Allying for Diversity and Inclusion in Ethnobiology (ADIE) which has brought together multiple academic societies (Society for Ethnobiology, Society for Ethnobotany, International Society for Ethnobiology) to discuss decolonial methodologies and ethical data practices, the North American Heritage at Risk project (NAHAR), and served as an interdisciplinary social scientist on the grant board of the Independent Research Fund Denmark for 'Green Research' (DFF).
She is co-founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Media (2018-2021, with Hunter Vaughan) which bridges work in environmental studies, climate justice, and science communication focusing on the role of new and emerging digital media in our understanding and perception of the environment. From 2021-2024 she co-directed the PXP Project (with Gregory Warden) which combines historical ecology and local indicators of climate change studies with archaeological excavation as part of an interdisciplinary regional landscape study of the Seggiano basin in Tuscany. She also serves on the Miami-Dade Vulnerability Assessment Working Group that is charged with ranking archaeological sites by risk of climate impacts.
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Research Interests: Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Ethnobiology, Anthropological approaches to environmental restoration, Indigenous Futures, Environmental communication, decolonial conservation, Historical ecology, Data sovereignty and ethics, Rewilding strategies, Environmental justice, Decolonizing practices by museums and parks, Deep-time enchantment, Local Environmental Knowledge (LEK), Archaeobotany, Applied ethics in interdisciplinary environmental social science methods, Epistemic justice, Ethnoecological methods, Role of environmental archaeology in contemporary conservation.
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Courses taught
Human Ecology, Rutgers University
11:374:250 Environmental Justice
11:374:101 Introduction to Human Ecology
Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy, University of Miami
Graduate-level
ECS 601 Environmental Research Methods
ECS 603 Environmental Interdisciplinary Methods
ECS 609 Contemporary Representations of the Environment*
ECS 610 Technology and Human Behavior*
ECS 611 Nature, the Anthropocene, and Visual Anthropology*
ECS 612 Environmental Justice & Storytelling*
ECS 612 Environmental Communication, New Media & Policy
ECS 790 Science, Media, & Storytelling
ECS 790 Directed Readings in Environmental Archaeology
ECS 790 Directed Readings in Anthropology and Environmental Media
ECS 790 Directed Readings in Focus Group/Oral History Methods
ECS 790 Environmental Field Methods
Faculty advisor for JUSTETHICS Graduate Student Workshop in mixed social science methods
EVS 580 (Franklin University) Biodiversity & Heritage
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*Included in the Native American and Global Indigenous Studies (NAGIS) program