Master of Arts in Sustainable Development

Faculty

Jeff Unsicker
PhD, MA, Stanford University
BA, University of California, San Diego

Professor
Chair, Sustainable Development
Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management

Jeff Unsicker completed graduate studies in international development, education, policy analysis, and administration. His research focused on the political economy of foreign aid for adult education, rural development, and Ujamaa socialism in Tanzania. A member of the SIT faculty since 1990, Jeff has also served as academic dean and interim president of SIT Graduate Institute. While at SIT, he co-founded and served as general secretary of a global partnership for educating NGO leaders that has programs in Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, and co-directed a program on leadership for social justice for the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowships Program.
Before joining SIT, Jeff was the coordinator of education and leadership development programs for an advocacy coalition of over 50 community-based organizations in Southern California; faculty director of the International Service and Development degree at an international liberal arts college in northern California; a research associate at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Botswana. His current teaching and practice are focused on policy analysis and advocacy by grassroots associations, NGOs, and other local, national, and transnational civil society organizations that are working for social change. He has recently done training and consulting for the advocacy divisions of BRAC in Bangladesh, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Oxfam America, and CARE. Jeff has also held various leadership and strategy planning roles in a statewide coalition of citizen, public interest, and environmental organizations that is committed to retiring Vermont's nuclear power reactor and replacing it with safe and green alternatives. Jeff's teaching, consulting, and activism are the basis for his book, Confronting Power: The Practice of Policy Advocacy (Kumarian Press, 2012).
Nikoi Kote-Nikoi
PhD, MA, University of Massachusetts
BA, Vassar College

Professor, Sustainable Development
Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management

Nikoi Kote-Nikoi, who holds a doctorate in economics, has been a member of the SIT Graduate Institute faculty since 1989. He also has served as a policy analyst and director of research at the Institute of Economic Affairs in his native Ghana, and as a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen, Marlboro College, and the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. As a development consultant, Nikoi has worked with international businesses and organizations, including the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and DANIDA. His research and writing explore context-specific theories and practices of development, with a focus on political economy, the economic impact of the AIDS pandemic, employment policy in transitional economies, financialization, and industrial policy for Africa. In addition to teaching courses in economic theory, development economics, policy analysis, and sustainable development, Nikoi has a thriving practice in policy analysis and advocacy in Ghana, where he is the co-founder and chief economist of the Center for Policy Priorities, a public policy research and advocacy institution in Accra. He sits on the boards of the Institute for Training and Development in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Free-Zone Authority of the Republic of Ghana. His major publications include ‘Beyond the New Orthodoxy: Africa’s Debt and Development Crises in Retrospect’ (Aldershot, UK: Avebury Press, 1996) and the forthcoming ‘Policy-Relevant Macroeconomics: A Critical Introduction to Orthodox Theory, Institutions and Policy' (Prentice-Hall). He also serves as an editor of the Journal of Social Policy and Development Research.
Christian Parenti
PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science
BA, Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research

Professor, Sustainable Development
Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management

Christian holds a PhD in sociology (co-supervised in geography) from the London School of Economics; he later completed a series of post-doctoral fellowships at the City University of New York Graduate Center where he worked closely with the geographers Neil Smith and David Harvey. He has held fellowships from the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. He arrived at SIT in 2011 from a teaching position at Brooklyn College. His current research focuses on the environmental history of state involvement in American economic development, from the earliest days of the republic onward. Most of his previous publications have focused on war, crime, repression, surveillance, and state power.
His latest book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011), explores how climate change is already causing violence as it interacts with the social legacies of economic neoliberalism and cold-war militarism. The book involved several years of travel and research in conflict zones of the Global South.

His three earlier books are The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2005), a work of analytic and ethnographic reportage on the first years of US military occupation in Iraq; The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (2002), a history of routine, everyday surveillance that traces the development of political technologies, like fingerprinting and photographic identification, from their origins in the antebellum South to the present; and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000/2008), Christian’s first book, considered a social science classic. Lockdown explores the history of the US prison and policing buildup since the 1960s and argues that the buildup is rooted in both global-scale economy shifts and national discursive projects of racialized class control and political theater.

As a journalist, he has reported extensively from Afghanistan, Iraq, and various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. His articles have appeared in Fortune, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Middle East Report, London Review of Books, Mother Jones, and The Nation (where he is a contributing editor). He has also helped make several documentaries and has won numerous journalistic awards, including the 2009 Lange-Tailor Prize and “Best Magazine Writing 2008” from the Society for Professional Journalists. He also received a 2009 Emmy nomination for the documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi.

In addition to teaching at SIT Graduate Institute, Christian is the director of SIT Study Abroad’s new comparative program focused on climate change and the political economy of resources. He splits his time between New York City and Brattleboro and is, quite coincidentally, a native of nearby Putney, Vermont.
Marla Solomon
EdD, MEd, University of Massachusetts
BA, Northwestern University

Professor, Sustainable Development
Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management

Marla J. Solomon came to SIT in 1992, and is a professor at the SIT Graduate Institute. She has also served as dean and associate dean. She currently teaches courses in practitioner inquiry, program monitoring and evaluation, leadership and organizations, gender, adult literacy, and development.
Marla provides consultant services in training and institutional capacity-building, research design, and the evaluation of development and other social programs, with a particular focus on evaluation for learning and enhancing program impact. Her clients have included World Education, BRAC, the Ford Foundation’s International Fellows Program Leadership for Social Justice Institute, Trace Foundation, the National Literacy Program of Cape Verde, IC-Net Japan, the Peace Corps, and Planned Parenthood. She has field experience in Mali, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, Malawi, Bangladesh, Japan, and the United States.

Marla holds a doctorate in non-formal education and development from the Center for International Education at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her current research is a multicultural study of women leaders for social justice, for which she was granted a fellowship at the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College. Her dissertation research was a study of the national women’s organization of the Republic of Cape Verde. Marla’s publications include Leadership for Social Justice Capacity-Building Resource Manual (SIT and Ford Foundation, 2007), “Knowledge to action: Evaluation for learning in a multi-organizational global partnership” in Development and the Learning Organisation (Oxfam Great Britain, 2003), and How Teachers Change: A Study of Professional Development in Adult Education (National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, 2003). She is fluent in French, Portuguese, and Cape Verdean Kriolu.