Directory listing text (incl.areas of expertise)
Carter is an assistant professor in the Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Management at Penn State University. As a Scholar-in-Residence at the Sustainability Institute he serves as the faculty-in-charge of the Sustainability Leadership Minor. He is a passionate researcher who conducts ethnographic fieldwork assessing the influence of nature-based tourism on biodiversity conservation and tourism’s role in sustainable community development around parks and protected areas in Latin America and Africa. He also draws upon environmental psychology to research the ways that visits to nature-based destinations influences travelers’ subsequent pro-environmental behavior.
At the undergraduate level, Carter teaches courses on sustainability, sustainable development, and sustainable tourism. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment (HDNRE) dual-doctoral degree program at Penn State. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. from Texas A&M University and a B.A. from the University of Kentucky. Carter is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology and prior to joining Penn State in 2013, he previously postdoctoral fellowships in both the Department of Anthropology and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.