Institutional Edgework: Navigating Field Intersections in Environmental Peacebuilding

Students, faculty and staff are invited to attend the second Nicholas Institute and UPEP Environmental Institutions Seminar Series presentation of the fall 2025 semester. The speaker will be Ambreen Ben-Shmuel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This is an in-person event with no virtual viewing option; no registration required. Drawing from fieldwork with an environmental peacebuilding organization in the Palestine/Israel context, this talk focuses on the concept of "institutional edgework," the ongoing processes through which organizations navigate tensions at the intersections of competing institutional demands in contexts of persistent complexity. Through examining how environmental organizations operate across political divides while working within the very systems they seek to transform, Ben-Shmuel will explore what it means to create possibilities at institutional edges, zones of both constraint and opportunity. SPEAKER BIO Ambreen Ben-Shmuel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, a joint program of the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Ben-Shmuel studies organizations operating at the intersection of sustainability and conflict, examining how they develop innovative practices to enable cooperation despite significant political and structural constraints. Her work explores organizational adaptation, power dynamics, and how organizations create possibilities for engagement in extreme contexts where traditional approaches may fail. Part of the UPEP Environmental Institutions Seminar Series, organized by the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and the University Program in Environmental Policy (UPEP), a doctoral degree program jointly offered by the Nicholas School of the Environment and Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.