Bradley Wilson

Dr. Bradley Wilson is Associate Professor of Geography and Executive Director of the Center for Resilient Communities at West Virginia University (WVU).

For more than 20 years, he has conducted research in communities responding to regional economic crises in Central America and more recently in Appalachia. His community-based participatory research explores the central role of solidarity, mutual aid, grassroots initiatives and social movements in forging alternative rural development pathways in these regions and beyond. Through collaboration with students and co-workers around the world, Bradley has contributed to a robust action research program and cooperative experiments at WVU which have evolved into the WVU Center for Resilient Communities.

As founder and director of the Center for Resilient Communities, he provides undergraduate and graduate training in participatory action research approaches and sustains partnerships with community organizations and grassroots leaders working to advance greater wellbeing through building regional food systems, supporting cooperative economic institutions, addressing past environmental degradation and preparing local populations for the impacts of future climate change.

Bradley holds a PhD in Geography from Rutgers University and has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Antipode, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Rethinking Marxism, Geoforum, Gender, Place and Culture, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Human Organization and Applied Geography. He has authored numerous reports related to research conducted on food and farming in West Virginia. His research and that of his graduate students has been funded by Fulbright, USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service, and Food and Nutrition Service, the Appalachian Regional Commission, as well as impact foundations such as the One Foundation, Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, Sisters Health Foundation and more.

Bradley is currently working on two books: Food Justice for All: Equity, Solidarity and Social Action in West Virginia and Grounds for Solidarity: Coffee, Crisis and Cooperative Action, which consolidates a decade of multi-sited ethnographic work studying in Nicaragua and the United States.