Kendra McSweeney is a "human-environment" geographer with interests in cultural ecology, conservation and development, demography, and land use/cover change. Recent work falls in three broad areas:

•     Forests and livelihoods
•     Smallholder response to rapid environmental change
•     Indigenous population dynamics

All explore how people who live within extremely dynamic landscapes respond to, and shape, environmental change (discursively, economically, or indirectly through demographic behaviors), and how a better understanding of these processes can inform rural development and conservation policy. An emphasis on field-based data construction runs through all projects.

Among her recent publications are "Conditional cash transfers, food security and health:  biocultural insights for poverty-alleviation policy from the Brazilian Amazon" in Current Anthropology (2016) and "Environmental politics after nature: conflicting socioecological futures" in Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2015).