The

Forest

Multiple

Bios

Adeniyi Asiyanbi is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Community Culture and Global Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of British Columbia – Okanagan Campus. His research focuses on political ecology at the intersections of forests, climate change, neoliberalism and development. His current projects examine the co-existence of forest fires and carbon offsetting in western Canada and the financialization of the ‘carbon forest’ in West Africa. His works have been published in Political Geography, The Geographical Journal, Geoforum, Journal of Political Ecology, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Andrea Botero Cabrera is a designer and researcher exploring technologies, services and media formats for collectives and communities. Through her research work she aims to understand how collectives come to understand the design spaces available to them and how designers could support infrastructuring processes. Andrea works as Professor and Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University, Finland; conspirator at the design studio Suo&Co; and Adjunct Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

LIANA CHUA is Tunku Abdul Rahman University Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Gemma Copeland is an interdependent digital designer and member of the digital tools cooperative, Common Knowledge.

Steffen Dalsgaard is Professor in Anthropology of Digital Technology at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Ethnography from Aarhus University (2010) where he did research on the state and leadership in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. He is the editor (with Morten Nielsen) of Time and the Field (Berghahn, 2015) and has published about the anthropology of the state, politics, technologies, and climate change in a variety of journals, including Social Analysis, Social Anthropology, and Ethnos. He is currently directing research projects on the cultural value of “carbon,” on technoscientific perceptions of urban air, and on the hope that digital technologies can be “decoupling.”

Véra Ehrenstein is a sociologist of science and technology and CNRS researcher based at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France. Her research explores how to study and make sense of the climate crisis as a new social reality. She is interested in topics including the United Nations’ REDD+ policy and scientific collaborations to measure the world’s forests, the economics of carbon markets, and the engineering of low-carbon innovations. Together with Daniel Neyland and Sveta Milyaeva, she has published Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action (Goldsmiths Press, 2019).

YUTI ARIANI FATIMAH is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

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 writes on digital technologies, environments and social life, with publications including Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle (2022), Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016), and Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011). She also co-edits the “Planetarities” short book series published through Goldsmiths Press. 

Lydia Gibson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL (and at the Center for Science and Society, Columbia University from September 2022), whose work at the intersection of anthropology and ecology focuses on Maroon traditional practices and sociotechnical configurations in a biodiverse Jamaican tropical rainforest. Gibson’s empirical work includes countermapping large, uncharted areas of forest, using and writing about automated sensing technologies (in situ and remote), and monitoring population changes of endemic bird species. Gibson is an IUCN SSC member (birds) and contributes to the monitoring and assessment of native parrots. Theoretically, Gibson writes against and thinks about the Capitalocene, the materiality of environmental practices, and the necropolitical.

Jenny Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University (PhD Geography, UCLA). She draws from political ecology, critical development studies, and science and technology studies to understand the role of digital technology in environmental governance in Indonesia. She is co-editor of the volume The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) and is currently working on a monograph, Land of No Return: Development after Degradation in Indonesia’s Peatlands.

Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter.

KATE LEWIS HOOD is a Research Assistant with the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Naomi Millner is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. Naomi is a political geographer and political ecologist who explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global “environments” in the context of changing global agendas for sustainability and changing terrains of conflict. Her work explores how conservation has become a vehicle for the militarization of conflicted areas – but also how rural communities are using conservation technologies such as drones to defend tenure rights and to articulate other visions of environmental futures. Naomi is currently involved in interdisciplinary projects in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru exploring the use of drones by communities and other actors.

Tami Okamoto is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Tami’s work explores alternative concepts and uses of territory in collaboration with Amazonian indigenous peoples in Peru.

CHRIS SANDBROOK is Professor of Conservation and Society in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Priscila Santos da Costa is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She completed her bachelor’s in Social Sciences at the State University of São Paulo, Brazil, and her PhD (2018) in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. She has conducted fieldwork in the Parliament of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, and her research focused on the state, bureaucracy, and religious ideology. Since then, she has begun undertaking a new ethnographic project in Brazil on the sociotechnical dimensions of efforts to develop and preserve the Amazon region.

Trishant Simlai is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Smart Forests project at the University of Cambridge at the University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge. His work broadly revolves around the politics and geographies of biodiversity conservation in India. His current research focuses on the social and political impacts of surveillance technologies.

Alex Taylor is Reader in Human Computer Interaction at City, University of London.

Esther Turnhout is a Professor and Chair of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the interactions between science, technology, policy and society, particularly in the context of environmental governance and sustainability transformations. She has published widely on topics such as the politics of knowledge, forest and biodiversity conservation, and global science-policy interfaces. She is first author of the book Environmental Expertise: Connecting Science, Policy and Society with Cambridge University Press, editor in chief of Environmental Science & Policy, and selected expert in Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). 

Tone Walford is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at UCL. Their research explores the effects of the exponential growth of digital data on social and cultural imaginaries and practices, with a focus on the natural sciences and environmental politics. They have published on topics such as data power and the politics of informational practices in the sciences, data aesthetics, and transdisciplinarity. They recently co-edited, with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Nick Seaver, a special issue in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, “Towards an Anthropology of Data” (2021).

Michelle Westerlaken is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University in Sweden. As an interdisciplinary researcher and designer her work builds on science and technology studies, critical animal studies, game studies, and participatory design methods to investigate possibilities for humans and other species towards more relational – multispecies – ways of living on this planet. So far, these projects have involved design negotiations together with cats, dogs, ants, penguins, forests, and various interactive technologies.

Alex Worrad-Andrews is a software engineer and faciliator, and member of Common Knowledge.