Speakers

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group, and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. She also leads the Citizen Sense and AirKit projects, which have both received funding from the ERC. She writes on digital technologies, environments and social life, with recent publications including How to Do Things with Sensors (2019); and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016). Her work can be found at planetarypraxis.org and jennifergabrys.net. Go to session

Bill Adams approaches questions of environmental development and conservation from perspectives of political ecology and environmental history. Go to session

Professor Karen Bakker works at the intersection of environmental and economic geography. My primary research interests span political economy, political ecology, environmental studies, STS, and digital geographies. She is currently focusing on a new research project on the implications of digital technologies for environmental governance. She is also the Co-Director of UBC’s Program on Water Governance, where she us leading an international comparative study of the water-energy nexus. She is also working on a SSHRC-funded partnership grant on Sustainable Water Governance and Indigenous Law. Go to session

Marika Avenel Brown (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, Canada. Her work looks to speculative texts to question what we (think we) know of as “nature”, and to ultimately point to better possible futures for both human and more-than-human life. Go to session

Myung-Ae Choi is an environmental geographer exploring the politics, cultures, geographies, and technologies of conservation in East Asian developmental state, especially South Korea. She is Research Assistant Professor at the Centre of Anthropocene Studies in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Go to session

Anmol Chowdhury is a doctoral student under the Urban Ecologies Project, funded by the European Research Council, anchored at National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, India. Their current work focuses on exploring the everyday lives of rhesus macaques in the cities of Delhi and Guwahati, India. Go to session

Alexander is a Human Geographer and Lecturer in Political Ecology at the University of Cambridge. His research is attentive to issues of land conflict, climate ontologies and nationalist natures in Southeast Asia. He enjoys playing the Untitled Goose Game when spare time is available. Go to session

Jenny is a PhD student in cultural geography at the University of Oxford. Her research interests are focused around digital media, political ecology, and perceptions of more-than-human rural landscapes. Her thesis focuses on digital identities in, and imaginations of, the Lake District National Park within the social media platform Instagram. She also works as an RA for the European research project contracts2.0, which aims to develop novel contract-based approaches to incentivise farmers for the increased provision of environmental public goods. Go to session

Katharine Dow is a senior research associate and deputy director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in connections between reproductive and environmental concerns and activism, from a multispecies perspective. She is the author of Making a Good Life (Princeton University Press, 2016). She is also on the steering group of London Freedom Seed Bank. Go to session

Sophia Doyle is a postgraduate student at Goldsmiths, studying the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. Her research focuses on critical ecologies, seed sovereignty, food and land justice and folk knowledges. She is co-director of the London Freedom Seed Bank and is writing her dissertation on the Seed Bank’s data project and how it relates to issues of knowledge commoning, open access and grower-seed relationships. Go to session

Lauren Drakopulos’s research examines how technology and Big Data are impacting how we come to know, care about and govern nature. Her current work focuses on emerging conservation monitoring technologies in oceans and fisheries. Lauren is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Go to session

Andrew Dwyer is an Addison Wheeler Research Fellow at Durham University, UK. His research spans cybersecurity, malware, computational agency, as well as the role of machine learning algorithms in the production and negotiation of security. He completed his PhD – Malware Ecologies – at the University of Oxford in 2019. Go to session

Marcus Foth is Professor of Urban Informatics in the QUT Design Lab. His transdisciplinary work is at the international forefront of human-computer interaction research and development with a focus on smart cities, community engagement, media architecture, internet studies, ubiquitous computing, and sustainability. Go to session

Anna Guasco is a Geography PhD candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at Cambridge University. Her doctoral research analyses histories, storytelling, and justice issues surrounding grey whale migration and conservation along the North American Pacific coast. Broadly, her research interests include more-than-human geographies, environmental justice, environmental history, and political ecology. Go to session

Oscar is an environmental and cultural geographer at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. He is interested in the practices and politics of environmental monitoring at the poles. His doctoral research investigates how assemblages of people, digital technologies, and animals have come to be configured as ‘early warning systems’ for polar environments, with a particular focus on the tracking and monitoring of seabirds. Go to session

Geoffrey Hobbis is an anthropologist who has spent the last decade researching digital transformations in Solomon Islands. . Geoffrey is an Assistant Professor with the Centre of Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, explores emerging trends in indigenous digital cultures and societies. Geoff’s research can be found the monograph, The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones (Palgrave, 2020). Go to session

Stephanie Hobbis is an anthropologist who has spent the last decade researching digital transformations in Solomon Islands. Stephanie is an Assistant Professor with the Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University, focuses on the everyday politics of infrastructural development. Go to session

Dr. Lily House-Peters is an Assistant Professor of Geography at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). I am a broadly trained environmental geographer whose research draws on theoretical, conceptual, and methodological insights from political ecology, sustainability science, queer theory and digital geography to examine the role of robotics, automation, and autonomous technologies in shaping our resource extraction futures. Go to session

Hannah Hunter (she/ her) is a field recordist and PhD Candidate in Geography at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research, supervised by Dr Laura Jean Cameron, explores human-animal relationships through sound. In particular, she is interested in the more-than-human histories of bird sound recording, and how these recordings can be re-imagined and re-purposed towards abundant multispecies futures. Go to session

George Iordachescu is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He was part of the BIOSEC Project where he researched illegal logging and security approaches to forest crime. His current research project investigates illegal wildlife trade in European species, combining political ecology and green criminology approaches. Go to session

Christian Keeve, nap enthusiast and fashion distraction, is a PhD student in Geography at the University of Kentucky. Lately they’ve been doing some thinking about living and lively archives, intimate ecologies, participatory seed work, and radical eco-futurisms. They just like to read comics and grow things. Go to session

Robert M. Anderson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. His current research examines the controversy and conflict over the return of wolves to the Pacific Northwest, exemplary of his broader interests in cultural and political dimensions of biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration. Go to session

Peta Mitchell is Associate Professor in QUT Digital Media Research Centre and School of Communication. Her research focuses on digital geographies, location awareness and mobile media, algorithmic culture, and network contagion. Go to session

Helge Peters is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. He currently conducts transdisciplinary research on urban water management in London using ethnographic and computational methods. Helge holds a doctorate in geography from Oxford and was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to that he obtained degrees in media and communications from Goldsmiths College and the Berlin University of the Arts. He lives in Berlin. Go to session

Ben is a cultural and historical geographer at the University of Cambridge primarily interested in the political and aesthetic operation of ecological landscape urbanism. Working between the materiality of ‘nonhuman labourers’ and their mediation, his work looks to identify ‘environmental’ forms of power and ways in which novel human-nonhuman relationships might provide spaces of disruption. Go to session

Julia Poerting is a human geographer at Bonn University, Germany. Her current research project examines attempts of technological mediations for a human-wolf-coexistence in Northern Germany. She is interested in how digital representations of wildlife and digital interventions in landscapes change conservation science and practice. Go to session

Dr Jonathan Prior is a lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University. His research and publications take an interdisciplinary approach, spanning environmental philosophy, sound studies, and landscape research. His first book, Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, co-authored with Emily Brady and Isis Brook, was published in 2018 by Rowman & Littlefield. Go to session

Chris is a political ecologist and Ph.D. student within the UBC Department of Geography. His research focuses on critical liberation ecologies and justice-oriented praxis. Prior to UBC, Chris worked as an international development practitioner and supported participatory action research programs in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Chris is originally from Kansas and uses he/him/his pronouns. Go to session

Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme is an anthropologist interested in human-nonhuman relations. He has done research on human-spirit-pig relations in a Filippino highland village and is now studying care, technoscience and material politics in Norwegian lobster fishing and is setting up a project on how climate change transforms human-marine relations in Maine, US. Go to session

Max Ritts is a geographer currently based in Sweden. His research combines political ecology, sound studies, and Critical Indigenous studies perspectives to investigate environmental governance politics in diverse forms. His book project, A Resonant Ecology, is under contract with Duke University Press. Go to session

Julian Rochlitz is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Bonn, where he works within the Collaborative Research Centre “Future Rural Africa: Future-making and social-ecological transformation”. His research focuses on information technologies in the agricultural sector in Kenya. He is particularly concerned with questions on the digitally mediated translation of environmental knowledge into agricultural practices and on how this shapes small-scale agriculture more broadly. Go to session

Markus Rudolfi is a sociologist at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. In his PhD  project he uses an ethnographic approach to study conservation practices at the Transboundary Park Bavarian Forest/Šumava (Germany/Czech Republic). Besides teaching courses in ethnography and environmental sociology, he is currently engaging with biodiversity monitoring technologies and participatory approaches in science. Go to session

Dr. Katherine Sammler is a human-environment geographer, with a background in atmospheric science and physics. We are the Lead of the Marine Political Ecology Research Collective at the Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, a part of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and University of Oldenburg in Germany. Go to session

Chris Sandbrook is a conservation social scientist at the University of Cambridge. His research investigates (i) the relationship between conservation and development at the landscape scale in developing countries, (ii) the role of values and evidence in shaping the decisions of conservationists and their organisations, and (iii) the social and political implications of new technologies for conservation. Go to session

Nathanael Sheehan’s research focuses on geo-computation methods for sustainable urban planning. Since graduating from his MSc at CASA UCL, he has worked on a UKRI funded project and contributed to several open-source R packages. Go to session

Hira is a Ph.D. Candidate with the Urban Informatics Research Group at the QUT Design Lab and QUT Digital Media Research Centre. She is an architect and an urban design theorist by background. Her research focuses on more-than-human smart urban governance. Go to session

Trishant Simlai is a doctoral candidate at The University of Cambridge and is primarily interested in the politics and the geographies of wildlife conservation in India. His current research focuses on the social and political implications of using surveillance technologies such as camera traps, drones, and ranger based LEM tools. Go to session

Navinder J Singh is an associate professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. His research is focussed on  finding innovations to solve societal problems arising from movements of animals and people. Singh works across diverse taxa (large mammals, raptors, rodents and fish) and ecosystems and studies ecological and evolutionary consequences of global changes. A dominant part of his work is to develop monitoring methods for quantifying changes in biodiversity and human behaviour and how this knowledge can be used for sustainable management of natural resources. Go to session

Alex is a second year PhD student researching the links between natural environments and health at the University of Exeter. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, he is applying approaches from environmental psychology to explore the therapeutic potential of digital nature experiences. Alex has a background in the physical sciences and has spent the last 15 years translating and communicating science through roles in the public sector, media, and academia. Go to session

Alexander Soete is a master’s student in New Media & Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. Having interned with organizations such as UNEP and IPBES, his focus has been on nature’s mediation and its engagement online. His interest lies with sustainability and ocean conservation, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. Go to session

Emma Tait is a Data Scientist with the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative, which provides ecological data collection, management, regional synthesis and collaboration across states and disciplines for the northeastern temperate forest in the US. She provides analytical, scripting, web development, spatial analysis, and data modeling support for FEMC. In her academic life she is a feminist digital geographer with a focus on the co-production of digital natures. Her recent research focuses on what digital natures do through their co-production by player expectation, developer assumption and actual implementation through code.  Other research interests include feminist digital natures, digital outer space natures, and scalability and nonscalability in video games. Go to session

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, researching the political ecologies and geographies of eco-fascism, mainly in Europe and North America. I am interested in how particular visions of ‘the people’ and nature have come to be articulated across time and space, and more recently, online. Go to session

Helen Verploegen is a cultural studies graduate from the Radboud University (The Netherlands), specialised in the environmental humanities. Her research explores how -digital- media and technology influence the relationship between humans and the environment. She is especially interested in citizen science and the representation of biodiversity loss. Go to session

Erica von Essen is an associate professor with Stockholm University and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Her research focuses on changing human-wildlife relations in modernity, including new roles and expressions for animals in human leisure, sport, consumption, technology and aesthetics. She is currently leading several projects on biosecurity and wild boars in Europe and in Scandinavia. Previously, she has been published on illegal killings of wildlife. Go to session

Michelle Westerlaken is a research associate in the ‘Smart Forest’ project in the Department of Sociology at The University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University (Sweden). As a designer, she explored possibilities for humans and other species to propose interaction modalities for multispecies ways of living on this planet, including design projects with cats, dogs, ants, and penguins. michellewesterlaken.com. Go to session

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine’s research focuses on ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants. He facilitates collaborative research in partnership with Indigenous and frontline communities. His book Underflows: transfiguring rivers, queering ecology is forthcoming from University of Washington Press. Go to session

Shih-Hsuan Yu is an applied conservation anthropologist based in Taiwan. She received her MA from the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 2018 and joined an initiative of clouded leopard reintroduction in Formosan Wild Sound Conservation Science Center in 2019. She works closely with Austronesian eco-knowledge holders to improve bio-cultural diversity. Go to session