UCLA-UIR Collaboration Continues with a Conference on Human-Environment Relations Across Mountainscapes

By CNES

In March 2026, the University of California at Los Angeles and Université Internationale de Rabat jointly organized a two-day international conference, “Landscapes in Transition: Human-Environment Relations Across Mountainscapes,” held in Rabat, Morocco. UCLA entities involved were the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and the UCLA Anthropology Department; for the Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR), the PPC (Public Policy Center), the CGS (Center for Global Studies), and the IPORA program were involved. The conference built on the successful completion in spring 2025 of an initial field survey for the Highland Ecology of Morocco project. It marked another step forward in the growing collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles, and Université Internationale de Rabat, which was initiated by Aomar Boum (UCLA Anthropology, interim director of CNES, Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, and member of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco) and further developed by Boum alongside Stephen Acabado (UCLA Anthropology, director of CSEAS) and Abdellatif Bencherifa (UIR). The conference also marked the inaugural gathering of the Asia-Africa-America Center for Culture, Environment, Society, and Sustainability (ACCESS), a joint initiative of UCLA and UIR designed to coordinate academic research on mountain environment and develop community-engaged research in mountain regions. As both Acabado and Bencherifa noted, ACCESS seeks to connect regions often studied separately through a comparative framework that pushes the boundaries of traditional area studies.

Reflecting this comparative approach, the conference brought together more than twenty scholars and cultural practitioners from the United States, Morocco, Germany, and the Philippines. Participants represented a range of disciplines, including geography, anthropology, archaeology, and sociology. The program featured five keynote lectures and three panel sessions, emphasizing knowledge exchange on mountain and terraced landscapes in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Morocco, with additional perspectives from the Caribbean, Europe and the American Southwest. Core themes included terraces as cultural heritage; water, soil, and climate systems; climate vulnerability assessments; participatory conservation; landscape mapping and modeling; and the intersection of policy and practice.

From the left: Abdellatif Bencherifa (UIR), Aomar Boum (UCLA), and Stephen Acabado (UCLA). Photo by Laurie Hart.

The keynote presentations addressed theoretical and historical dimensions of human-environment relations, including perspectives on mountain and terraced landscapes, environmental change and human agency, and the preservation of terraces as cultural heritage. Additional talks focused on historical ecology in Southeast Asia and water management practices in Morocco’s Anti-Atlas Mountains.

The panel sessions extended these conversations. The first examined how interdisciplinary work in anthropology, archaeology, and historical anthropology can reshape understandings of mountain societies and inform new research on Morocco’s highland communities. The second highlighted contributions from geography and related fields to the study of mountain cultures. The third brought together community leaders and scholars from Morocco and the Philippines to explore how climate change intersects with cultural landscapes, health, aging, migration, heritage, and local knowledge systems.

The conference’s collaborative momentum continued in the days that followed. A research team led by Abdellatif Bencherifa pursued the 2025 initial research activities; Earl John Hernandez, a UCLA graduate student in Archaeology, and Anass Marzouki, a postdoc at UIR, conducted drone-based mapping in the Anti-Atlas Mountains to support a larger research expedition planned for January 2027. The conference proceedings will be published in a volume edited by Acabado, Bencherifa, and Boum.