Professor Barbara Chambers

Position

Professor of International Research
Adjunct Professor in International Community Development

Contact details

Tel: +61 2 6201 5141
Email: Barbara.Chambers@canberra.edu.au

Biography

Professor Barbara Chambers was the foundation director of the Australian Institute for Sustainable Communities at the University of Canberra. She has established an international reputation in the field of collaborative methodologies and gender, agriculture and food security. Working closely with marketing and economics researchers, as well as agricultural scientists, she has developed innovative methodologies in community engagement, especially with farmers and other members of supply chains, such as transporters, traders, wholesalers and consumers.  In 2010, she taught a five day training program in Organic Research and Collaborative Development to young researchers in Vietnam, funded by the Crawford Foundation. She has won several Category 1 research grants since 2001, beginning with an ARC SPIRT Grant (2001 – 2003) in Coleambally in rural NSW and subsequently with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). Her most recent ACIAR research grant with Professor John Spriggs is Social Research to Foster Effective Collaboration and Strengthen Pro-Poor Value Chains, worth 1.4 million, which is part of a set of ACIAR commissioned activities funded by AusAID under the Pakistan Agricultural Linkages Program (ASLP – Phase 2). She was also a collaborator in winning a recent ACIAR project, with Barbara Pamphilon as project leader, called Examining women's business acumen in Papua New Guinea: Working with women smallholders in horticulture.  This project built on a previous small scoping study in the same area. In recent years, the focus of her research activity has been rural women and youth in developing countries.

Research Interests

*    Cross-disciplinary research in developing countries
*    Collaborative Methodologies
*    Gender and  Agriculture