Contributor biographies

Ajith Raj

Ajith Raj is a PhD candidate in the Transdisciplinary Sustainability program at the Grenfell Campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is part of the Future Ocean and Coastal Infrastructures (FOCI) project and is working on a collaborative study with the Town of Fogo Island to explore the seaweed–society relationship. Ajith employs critical future studies and foresighting as both a disciplinary lens and methodological approach in his research. Before joining FOCI, he lived in the western Indian archipelago of Lakshadweep, where he worked with the pole-and-line fishing community to develop a co-management system for local fisheries.

Anna Kirstine Schirrer

Anna Kirstine Schirrer is an anthropologist and social critic working in Northern Europe and the Anglophone Caribbean. She specializes in justice-claims and international law and governance, diplomacy, and the global politics of climate change. Her research has been published in Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation among others. Schirrer is a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen and earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University.

Astrid Møller-Olsen

Astrid Møller-Olsen is a literary scholar and translator. She is the author of Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria 2022) and hosts the xiaoshuo.blog. Her research has appeared in Plant Perspectives, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, PRISM, SFRA Review, International Journal of Heritage Studies and Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature. She is currently a Carlsberg Research Fellow with the University of Copenhagen writing a monograph on plants in contemporary fiction.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University and founder of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. Her publications include Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard UP 1997), Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP 2005/2006), and Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene: On Science, Belief, and Humanities (Open Humanities Press 2018). Smith’s recent research interests include radical enactivist accounts of human cognition and intellectual and institutional relations between the sciences and the humanities.

Bronislaw Szerszynski

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. His research seeks to situate social life in the longer perspective of human and planetary history, drawing on the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities. He is author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) and co-author with Nigel Clark of Planetary Social Thought (2021).

Carolin Slickers

Carolin Slickers is currently a Ph.D. candidate and scholarship holder at the German-Italian Graduate School (Universität Bonn/ Università degli studi di Firenze, 2022-2025). She studied French, German, and Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn, the Sorbonne Paris IV, and the University of St. Andrews. Her dissertation project engages with oil as hyperobject in the petrofiction of the 20th century. Her research is focused on the Energy and Infrastructure Humanities, and Posthuman Ecofeminism.

Caroline O’Donnell

Caroline O’Donnell, from Derry, Northern Ireland, is the Edgar A. Tafel Professor of Architecture and former Chair of the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. At Cornell, she also leads the Ecological Action Lab, researching and producing ecological design and theory. O’Donnell is a licensed architect and sole principal of CODA, winner of MoMA/PS1's Young Architects Program in 2013. Publications include: Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site, Routledge (2015); The Architecture of Waste: Design for a Circular Economy: Ed. Caroline O’Donnell and Dillon Pranger, Routledge (2019), and Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis, Caroline O’Donnell and José Ibarra, AR+D/ORO Publications (2022).

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her writing on feminism, queer ecologies, ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and multispecies biopolitics includes the edited, multi-genre collection Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Caitlin, 2019) and the co-edited anthology Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Indiana UP, 2010, with Bruce Erickson). She is currently completing a creative monograph, Dear Jane Rule, on the life and writing of the lesbian icon, and working on the essay collection Plantasmagoria: Botanical Encounters in the (M)Anthropocene.

Cecilie Sachs Olsen

Cecilie Sachs Olsen is Professor of Art and Society at Oslo Metropolitan University. Her work is practice-led and revolves around developing creative methods for urban research and exploring how artistic practice can be used as a framework to analyse and re-imagine urban development, space and politics. Cecilie was the chief curator of Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019, which used fiction, art and performance to explore degrowth as alternative social and spatial structures that question the supremacy of economic growth as the basis of contemporary societies. She is also the co-founder of the urban performance collective zURBS.

Charlotte Grum

Charlotte Grum works as a Teaching Associate Professor of Social Psychology and Learning at the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University in Denmark, exploring with the students wild and wicked problems in the intersections of social psychology and environmental humanities. She is also an artist, producing site-sensitive performative situations in public space. Post-humanist, new materialist and post-qualitative figurations inform her artist-academic practice, exploring becoming with entangled human-non-human relations and other multispecies ecologies.

Christa Holm Vogelius

Christa Holm Vogelius is a New Carlsberg Fellow in Art Research at the University of Southern Denmark, where she works on transnational/comparative American literature and culture of the early national period to the present day, with specializations in gender/sexuality studies and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Original Copy: Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025) and a co-editor on the forthcoming Brill Companion to the Literary History of the Early Anthropocene.

Davey Whitcraft

Davey Whitcraft is a Berlin-based artist working with moving image, installation, and sound to explore the traces left by systems of extraction. His practice blends speculative research and fieldwork, using tools like modified cameras, drones, and radios to sense what lies beyond human perception. Engaging with media infrastructures, ecology, and political histories, Whitcraft maps what he calls “Sites of Accumulation”—where climate, data, and extraction collide. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Architecture + Design Museum (LA), Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam), and The Wrong Biennale. He holds a PhD from the European Graduate School and an MFA from UCLA.

Diego Cagüeñas

Diego Cagüeñas is a Colombian anthropologist and philosopher. Ph.D. in Anthropology and Historical Studies. M.A. in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis. Assistant Professor in Cultural and Ecological Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Member of the Amsterdam Institute for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). My research interests are political ecology, cosmologies, and perspectivism, memory studies and 20th century Latin-American intellectual history. Latest publication: Cagüeñas, Diego. (2024). When Forests Run Amok: War and its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories, Daniel Ruiz-Serna, 2023. Revista Colombiana de Antropología, 60(3), e2876.

Dominic Boyer

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker and environmental researcher who directs the Social Design Lab at Rice University and co-Directs the Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience (CFAR). The author of nine academic books and volumes and more than 100 articles, Boyer’s recent research has been supported by NSF, NOAA, the Berggruen Institute, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. As a designer, together with Cymene Howe he helped create the world’s first glacier memorial, which was named a Finalist for a 2020 Beazley Design of the Year Award by the London Design Museum. The same project inspired The Economist to create its first-ever obituary for a non-human. He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow working on a book, Electric Futures, which explores the cultural impact of electrification ventures across the world.

Eva la Cour

Eva la Cour is a visual artist and postdoc at the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE) and the Department for Art and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Assuming an overlap between colonial histories, geopolitics, and colonial image practices, her research revolves around how Arctic locations and discourses are imagined and engaged in the context of the region as a hotspot for climate collapse in the present. Effects of her artistic practice have been exhibited internationally and inform her Ph.D. from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, SE (2022).

Fernando Racimo

Fernando Racimo is Associate Professor at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, and author of the upcoming book Science in Resistance (UC Press), on the emergence and evolution of the Scientist Rebellion movement for climate justice. As a member of the UCPH Degrowth network, he teaches and writes on degrowth and decolonization, with a particular focus on academia and social movements.

Finnja Bohlken

Finnja Bohlken is currently enrolled in a Bachelor program at Leuphana University Lüneburg, pursuing a major in Cultural Studies and a minor in Sustainability Studies. In her major, she has expressed particular interest in the fields of capitalism and cultural criticism, as well as perspectives from trans and queer studies. Her minor study program involves a project that aims to promote the Cradle-to-Cradle concept within the textile industry.

Gísli Pálsson

Gísli Pálsson (Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Manchester) is former professor at the University of Iceland and the University of Oslo. He has written extensively on a variety of issues – including human-animal relations, slavery, extinction, and environmental discourse – and he has done anthropological fieldwork in Iceland, the Republic of Cape Verde, and the Canadian Arctic. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including Biosocial Becomings; Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (co-edited with Tim Ingold (2013), The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan (2016), The Human Age: How We Created the Anthropocene Epoch and Caused the Climate Crisis (2020), and The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of extinction (2024).

Henriette Steiner

Henriette Steiner is Professor and Head of Section of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Society at the University of Copenhagen. She works on the history and philosophy of architecture, landscapes and cities. Recent books include Tower to Tower (with Kristin Veel, MIT Press, 2020), Touch in the Time of Corona (with Kristin Veel, De Gruyter, 2021), and Untold Stories – Women Gender and Architecture in Denmark (with Jannie Bendsen and Svava Riesto, Strandberg Publishing, 2023). Together with Svava Riesto, she is co-PI of two Stories from Sofiegården: Alternative Forms of Living in Copenhagen as Cultural Heritage (funded by Augustinus Foundation) and Learning from Collaboration – Building Future Practice (funded by Realdania), and she is a recent recipient of a Monograph Fellowship of the Carlsberg Foundation.

Imre Szeman

Imre Szeman is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His current research focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of energy use and its implications for energy transition and climate change. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), and is completing work on Green Dreams: Why Technology Won’t Save the World (with Tanner Mirrlees, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026). Szeman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Insa Winkler

Insa Winkler is a freelance visual artist (Dr., Diploma in Fine Arts, Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts, Kiel, 1988); Member of the Professional Association of Visual Artists (BBK), a landscape planner (M.Sc. in Architecture and Environment, Wismar University of Applied Sciences, 2009); Member of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) as well as a cultural scientist (doctorate, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Institute for Sociology and Cultural Organisation, Institute for Sustainability, 2020). Winkler is founder of `Social Landart´ (1996): an aesthetic-social approach to collective places and landscapes. She is the initiator of various environmental art projects and workshops in and about crisis areas. Winkler has participated in numerous international projects and has received numerous national and regional art and culture awards.

Irmak Ertör

Irmak Ertör is a political ecologist and marine social scientist, and works as an associate professor at the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Bogazici University, Istanbul, since 2019. She has been a Marie Curie early-stage researcher of the ENTITLE project (European Network of Political Ecology) and completed her PhD on the "Political Ecology of Marine Finfish Aquaculture in Europe" at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), where she later worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC-funded ENVJUSTICE project, focusing on fisheries conflicts and environmental justice. She teaches and studies political ecology, alternative economies, environmental history, community-supported fisheries, food sovereignty, and blue economy/degrowth, blue/environmental justice.

Jessica Saxby

Jessica Saxby is a writer, researcher and lecturer. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths University of London. Her work focuses on plants, seeds, and the environment as a means to address questions of memory and transmission in the context of the colonial past and present. She is interested in the way different experimental artworks allow for an engagement with these issues.

John Charles Ryan

John Charles Ryan is an international researcher in literary studies, creative writing, and environmental humanities. He is Associate Professor and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia, as well as Visiting Researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland. Funded by the Kone Foundation, his current research examines possibilities for human-tree collaboration in Northern Finland. Ryan’s books include Environment, Media and Popular Culture in Southeast Asia (2022, Springer, co-edited) and Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2022, Routledge, co-authored). He is Chief Editor of the journal Plant Perspectives and Managing Co-Editor of The Trumpeter.

Josephine Taylor

Josephine Taylor is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin working on the ENACT project, Energy Narratives and Change in Coastal Communities in Ireland. The role is focused on how the community experiences transitions to renewable energy in coastal regions. She has published in the area of energy humanities focusing on art and cultural responses to energy extraction. Her first monograph, The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, is forthcoming with Palgrave's Animal and Literature Series. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender where they organise, write and work together around the umbrella of queer and feminist science fiction.

Julia Watson

Julia Watson, Australian-born and of Greco-Egyptian descent, is a connoisseur of localized traditional ecological knowledge. She is the author of the Lo—TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism (Taschen, 2019), which showcases the soft, earth-based technologies of Indigenous peoples across the globe, and the upcoming Lo—TEK Water (2025). Julia has traveled the earth over to understand these technologies and respectfully share the messages of their makers with the world. Watson grew up in Australia, where aboriginal science and knowledge is not only acknowledged in the school system but systematically integrated into university curricula. She is thus driven to steer other nations towards properly respecting and integrating Indigenous knowledge into the “mainstream.” She studied landscape architecture at Harvard, taught for over a decade at institutions like Columbia, Harvard and RISD, cofounded the Lo—TEK Institute, which empowers generational wisdom through nature-based education and advocacy, cocreated the The Living Earth Curriculum and Digital Database, which uplift traditional ecological knowledge to enhance STEM programs, and runs a design studio in Brooklyn, New York, which provides strategic consulting and design expertise at the intersection of culture, ecology, and innovation.

Karen Holmberg

Karen Holmberg is a volcanologist and archaeologist at New York University who examines the long-term experiences that humans have had with environments that change radically and unpredictably. She has conducted fieldwork in Amazonia, Antarctica, Belize, El Salvador, Panama, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Patagonia, southern Italy, and New York City. Holmberg is the co-founder and Scientific Director of the NYU Gallatin WetLab, an experimental, public-facing teaching art-science laboratory based on Governors Island. She is deeply interested in how creative communication of science and engineering insights through collaboration with the arts can contribute to more sustainable and equitable societies. 

Katharina Kral

Katharina Kral is a licensed architect, Lecturer, and the Housing Innovation Research Fellow at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture. She also directs Cornell’s Housing Innovation Lab, where she leads interdisciplinary research on adaptable housing, sustainability, and human well-being. Kral co-developed computational tools such as AutoFrame, SEED, and Viewscore.io, which support early-stage assessments of carbon, cost, daylight, window views, and visual privacy, particularly in residential contexts. Her work merges building science with speculative design to reimagine responsive and equitable housing futures. In practice, she explores design strategies for adaptive reuse and densification in both rural and urban environments.

Kristin Veel

Kristin Veel is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the intersections of technology, everyday life, and aesthetics. She has worked on the narrative and temporal dimensions of data accumulation and contributed to developing a cultural studies perspective within the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies. Her work is shaped by a commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and an interest in how transparency, obfuscation, and uncertainty are negotiated in contemporary data cultures. Recent publications include the monograph co-written with Henriette Steiner Touch in the Time of Corona: Reflections on Love, Care and Vulnerability in the Pandemic (de Gruyter, 2021).

Laura Vargas

Laura Vargas is a Colombian sociologist interested in political ecology, assimilation, and local adaptation to change, with a particular focus on gender and childhood. As a young researcher from the Biophilia Alliance, I participate in the management, development, and mediation of the Biodiversity Museum Network in Colombia. My degree thesis, developed in collaboration with piangüera women from the Colombian Pacific, has been recognized in academic spaces such as the International Sociology Congress held in the Dominican Republic.

Laura Watts

Laura Watts is an author, consultant, ethnographer of speculative futures, and Visiting Professor at Department for Thematic Studies, Linköping University. Her last book, Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press), won the 4S Rachel Carson Prize for its social and political relevance and was shortlisted for Saltire Research Book of the Year. She is currently creating a narrative role-playing game around a low carbon data center caught in a Nordic winter storm. More details at sand14.com.

Linda Lapi

Linda Lapi (pronouns: she, they and it) is a mover, a knowledge worker and a psychologist. She works as associate professor of Cultural Encounters and Global Humanities at Roskilde University in Denmark. Linda’s work explores our ways of moving-with our environments, ecological feelings and ecological consciousness. Linda uses arts-based methods to address embodiment, affect, and plurality in knowledge creation. She is committed to broadening the possibilities for knowing and being differently in academia, learning from fellow species and ecologies.

Marcus Enoch

Marcus Enoch is a professor of Transport Strategy at Loughborough University in the UK where he teaches future urban planners and civil engineers. His research focuses on how transport systems impacted by governance, policy and broader contextual factors might change in the medium to long term, and about how providers and Government might best respond. He is particularly interested in how emergent societal and technological transformations, such as big data, ageing populations, and driverless cars may affect the future development of transport systems. Other areas of expertise include measures to manage car use (e.g. travel plans), public transport systems (rail and road), and how transport systems work at the macro level. His most recent book, Roads Not Yet Travelled: Transport Futures in 2050, was published in May 2025 by Bristol University Press.

Martyn Bone

Martyn Bone is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (2018) and The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005). His third monograph, The Writings of Jesmyn Ward: Matters of Black Southern Life and Death, will be published in July 2025. He is also the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (2007) and co-editor of three books in the "Understanding the South" mini-series: Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South (2013); The American South in the Atlantic World (2013); and Creating and Consuming the American South (2015).

Nicoletta Isar

Nicoletta Isar, docteur ès lettres, is Associate professor emeritus at University of Copenhagen, a theorist of image conducting comparative and interdisciplinary research on patterns of imagination, as they emerge in the visual, the acoustic, and the sensorial. She is the founder of the IMAGINARY LAB 4 SENSATIONS: INEFFABLE ARCHAEOLOGIES (2021-), and the author of The Dance of Adam. Byzantine Chorography (2011), Elemental Chorology. Vignettes Imaginales (2020), and the edited volume Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances in the Pulsatile Imaginary: Rites of Disimagination (Palgrave Macmillan 2024). She is currently preparing the edited volume Metamorphosis – Ecstases of Matter and Image. A Space of Ongoing Desire and Wonder.

Nigel Clark

Nigel Clark is Professor of Social Sustainability at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature (2011) and co-author with Bronislaw Szerszynski of Planetary Social Thought (2021). His current work looks at connections between inner and outer Earth, evolution of human care, and deep histories of European violence.

Rachel Webb Jekanowski

Rachel Webb Jekanowski is an interdisciplinary film and media scholar researching cultural histories of energy and resource extraction. Dr. Jekanowski is Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty with the Environmental Policy Institute at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Canada. She serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Environmental Media and The Goose: Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.

Robert Boschman

Robert Boschman has written and published widely in the Environmental Humanities, including White Coal City: A Memoir of Place and Family (University of Regina Press, 2021), which received critical and public acclaim in Canada. His ongoing Uranium Cities project has involved field work in five legacy sites on four continents, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). As a member of the Canadian Association of Professional Image Creators (CAPIC), Boschman works as a stills documentarian covering environmental issues in film and digital. He chairs the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

Ryan Juskus

Ryan Juskus is Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame. His research and teaching focus on the intersections of environmental studies, religion, social ethics, and politics, using humanistic and qualitative research methods to examine and develop just and transformative responses to environmental, climate, and energy challenges. Ryan earned a Ph.D. in religion from Duke University with a focus on Christianity and environmental politics in the Americas. Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, Ryan held academic positions at Princeton University, Princeton Seminary, Wake Forest University, and Duke University.

Sarah E. Vaughn

Sarah E. Vaughn is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Vaughn’s research agenda entails developing an ethnographic approach and critical social theory of climate adaptation. This research primarily focuses on Guyana and Bermuda. She is the author of numerous articles published in scholarly journals as well as literary and environmental magazines. She is the author of the award-winning book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke, 2022). She is the co-editor-in-chief of the flagship journal Cultural Anthropology (2026-2030, Wiley Press). 

Serpil Opperman

Serpil Opperman is Professor of environmental humanities and director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University. Oppermann played a key role in developing material ecocriticism—an ecocritical theory that she has continued to expand, exploring the expressive creativity of the more-than-human world at the intersections of science studies, environmental, and blue humanities. She has served as the 7th President of EASLCE—European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (2016–2018). She is the author of Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene (2023) and Blue Humanities: Storied Waters in the Anthropocene (2023).

Sophie Wennerscheid

Sophie Wennerscheid is Associate Professor of Nordic Literature at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. Her research spans ecocriticism, rural studies, food studies, speculative fiction, and gender and sexuality studies. Published in 2019, her latest book, Sex Machina: Zur Zukunft des Begehrens (Sex Machina: On the Future of Desire, 2019), explores how technology reshapes intimate relationships. Her current work marks a shift from human–machine relations to the entangled dynamics between humans, plants, and animals. In her forthcoming book, Living with the Land: Exploring Eco-Conviviality through Contemporary Literature and Film, she investigates how rural narratives engage with food production, ecological belonging, and multispecies conviviality.

Solveig Gade

Solveig Gade is a dramaturge and Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the Section for Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. She serves as co-PI on the Velux Foundation-funded collaborative research project Oikos: A Cultural Analysis of Crisis and Care in the 21st Century. Her recent books include War and Aesthetics: Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare (edited by Bjering, Engberg-Pedersen, Gade, and Strandmose Toft; MIT Press, 2024) and (W)Archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (edited by Agostinho, Gade, Bonde Thylstrup, and Veel; Sternberg Press, 2020).

Søren Reith-Hauberg

Søren Reith-Hauberg holds an MA in Modern Culture from the University of Copenhagen. He works in the intersection of philosophy, ecocriticism, and art, and is employed as program curator at the science and nature festival Bloom. His first book CONTAMINATION AESTHETICS – Ecological Sensibility in a World with No Future was published in 2024.

Stefanie Heine

Stefanie Heine is associate professor for Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse: Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (Turia & Kant, 2014), Poetics of Breathing: Modern Literature’s Syncope (SUNY, 2021), Tangential Terrains: Cormac McCarthy’s Geoaesthetics (University of Nevada Press, forthcoming 2026), and editor of Mineral Poetics (2022).

Václav Mašek Sánchez

Václav Mašek Sánchez is a Guatemalan Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), with a master's degree in Sociology (USC, 2023) and Latin American and Caribbean Studies (NYU, 2019). He is a doctoral researcher at REAL: A Post-Growth Deal, an ERC-funded project that promotes scientific research for achieving post-growth transformations. His dissertation involves a multi-sited ethnography of grassroots movements stitching alliances to institutionalize post-extractivism in Colombia and Guatemala. Vaclav writes monthly opinion editorials on political ecology and development sociology for elPeriódico, one of Guatemala’s largest daily newspapers in Spanish, and El País in Spain.

Vasundhara Bhojvaid

Vasundhara Bhojvaid is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Shiv Nadar University. Her research explores the intersections of science, air pollution, climate change and ecological relationships in India. In these explorations, entities like clouds, smoke, human and non-human bodies and practices reconfigure how social worlds are made. This is informed by her broader interests in how air pollution has close intersections with climate change and is charting new ways in which to anthropologically explore the contemporary.

Vibe Nielsen

Vibe Nielsen is a Social Anthropologist, working on issues related to the decolonisation of museums, botanical gardens and public places. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen (2019) and is currently affiliated as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is an Associate Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum and holds a Research Fellowship at Linacre College at the University of Oxford, where she is also affiliated with the Department of the History of Art. She was recently elected Member of the Young Academy at the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.

Wendy Harcourt

Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She was born in Australia, lives in Italy and currently works in The Netherlands. She joined the ISS in November 2011 after 23 years at the Society for International Development, Rome as Editor of the journal Development. She is series editor of the Palgrave Gender, Development and Social Change series, and Bloomsbury Academic New Critical Thinking in Development series. Her latest book Conundrums of Care will be published by Bloomsbury (2026).

Wolfgang Ernst

Wolfgang Ernst has been, until his retirement in autumn 2024, Professor for Media Theories at Humboldt University in Berlin where he founded the Department for Media Science in 2003. He received his doctorate in history and habilitated in media studies and cultural studies. Since his research turn towards media archaeology, he devoted his writings and teaching primarily to theories of the archive, media temporality and sonic media processes. He is currently exploring the intra-technical technológos of cultural knowledge.