Anna Tsing is professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (all from Princeton University Press). Some of the volumes she co-edited are Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, with Paul Greenough), Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (AltaMira, with Peter Brosius and Charles Zerner), and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (University of Minnesota Press, with Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt). Currently, she is co-editing Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman-Saxena, and Feifei Zhou.
Megan Thomas is interested in political thinking, history, and Southeast Asia–especially the Philippines–and in trying to recover historical political thinking that falls outside of what is often thought to constitute political theory. She is the author of Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarshipand the End of Spanish Colonialism, and several articles on intellectual and social history of the Philippines. In addition to her SEACoast affiliation, Megan Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics, where she teaches political theory.
Kathleen ‘Kat’ Gutierrez specializes in Philippine botany, colonial science, and the environmental humanities. A Southeast Asianist by training, Kat is in her intellectual comfort
zone when in the presence of regional specialists and those excited to think around the mainland/island divide. She is an assistant professor of in the Department of History at UCSC
and is the co-PI for Watsonville is in the Heart, a community generated public history project. She has written on Philippine medical botany, nomenclatural politics, and the very personal
dimensions of research that stimulate her work.
Gillian Bogart is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research explores social and ecological transformation, especially in relation to capital-driven disturbance. She is interested in how relationships are forged through and across difference in everyday life. Gillian is currently engaged in research that attends to time, memory, and more-than-human histories, like those of salt, weeds, and spirits. She loves to cook and feed people.
Joe Klein is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and an ethnographer of economic and environmental change. His research focuses on the relationships between ecological collapse and the reorganization of livelihoods, capital, and debt along the coastlines of Indonesia. He focuses especially on coral reefs as windows to understanding histories of capital. Joe is broadly interested in marine historical ecology, environmental history, economic anthropology, political ecology, and is an avid diver and amateur gardener.
Zahirah is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work examines how environmental changes such as coastal development, climate change, and harmful algal blooms are impacting human and nonhuman communities in the Johor Straits. Working alongside marine scientists and coastal communities, Zahirah will explore how local knowledge and experience of changes to seagrass meadows, microbial ecologies, mangrove forests, and engineered hydrologies can enrich academic understanding of drastic changes in ecological states. During her spare time, Zahirah participates in biodiversity beach patrols in her hometown of Singapore, where she has encountered elusive dugong trails and sea turtle nesting grounds.
Kirsten Keller is a PhD candidate in Anthropology. Her research explores the ecological and political effects of the global movement of models of flood management, and how coastal communities (human and nonhuman) negotiate changing conditions. Her current project focuses on relationships between water infrastructures, inequality, flooding, and coastal landscape change in Jakarta, Indonesia. Kirsten’s broad interests include histories of water infrastructure, urban ecology, and environmental justice in delta cities. She likes running, biking to high places, and picnics.
Inditian Latifa is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research explores what landscape structures and patterns can teach us about long-term coexisting histories of human/nonhuman relations and political economic transformation, expanding our imaginations of multispecies pasts and futures. Indi focuses especially on the nonsecular multispecies world of forest-savanna mosaics in Aceh, Indonesia and how they are linked to histories of land use, international trade, and state formation. She enjoys cooking, indoor gardening, and day hiking.
Wayne Huang is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research seeks to understand the lives of Muslim farmers through the connections between Islamic revival and agroforest gardens in the Kerinci highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia. He is broadly interested in the anthropology of religion and secularism, personhood and the more-than-human, and the past and present of ethnography. Wayne also writes about the entanglement of geopolitical agendas and academic discourses in the Asia-Pacific, something that resonates with his Taiwanese background. He is a huge fan of badminton.