The EnviroAnt Network was founded by Aet Annist and Franz Krause. Its current convenors are:

Aet Annist

Aet Annist’s interests vary from social and symbolic dispossession to institutionalised heritage management; from migrants to media representations of crime, from disenfranchised youth to facilitatory training. Her current focus has shifted increasingly onto the theme she has promoted since the 1990s on the public arena but outside her research agenda: environmental and climate crises. Leading a working group within a project on environmentalism in Estonia (www.environmentalism.ee), her research now combines the empirical material on fractured, fragmented relations that neoliberal change brought along in the post-socialist world, with new research into the emerging environmental movements in Estonia and the UK. This combination would hopefully throw light on the various socialities created by climate and environmental affect and the prospect of catastrophic futures.

Franz Krause

Franz Krause is fascinated by water: the joys it brings and the ideas it inspires, but also its lack, pollution, overabundance, use, control, infrastructures, and what it does to landscapes and social life. For him, water is profoundly social, in the conflicts that erupt over it and the collaborations that are forged for using or preserving it, as much as in myriad other ways. Franz works as an anthropologist at the University of Cologne in Germany. He currently leads a junior research group focusing on life in river deltas around the world (www.delta.uni-koeln.de) and is conducting research with Gwich’in and Inuvialuit inhabitants of the Mackenzie Delta in the Canadian Arctic. Previously, Franz has conducted research with people living along a river in Finish Lapland, with residents in flood-prone areas of Southeast England, and with the inhabitants of a wetland area in Estonia. 

Alexandra Cotofana

Alexandra Coțofană is an anthropologist working in the Social Sciences Department at Zayed University Abu Dhabi and a 2020-2021 Fellow in Environmental Humanites at IASH University of Edinburgh. Alexandra’s research explores intersections of political ecologies, modernities, and ontologies of governing, currently focusing on the importance of xenophobic sentient landscapes for ideations of state futures and state pasts.

Arvid van Dam

Arvid van Dam is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn and visiting scholar at the Global South Studies Center in Cologne. Under the working title ‘Infrastructures of Infection’, his research combines insights from infrastructure and multi-species studies, in order to investigate pathways of (arbo)virus transmission. Asking how infrastructures associated with the spread and containment of viruses (including roads, wildlife corridors and veterinary fences) reflect and channel existing tensions between nature conservation and farming, the cross-disciplinary study project aims to shed light on what futures these discourses and infrastructures portray, promise, or foreclose for rural Africa. Positioned at the crossroads of environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities, his Marie Sklodowska-Curie-funded doctoral research at the University of Leeds explored the making and unmaking of landscape in the arid southeast of Spain. As part of this, Arvid has been a visiting doctoral fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. In previous research, he studied Tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka.

Katrine Callander

Katrine Callander is an applied/environmental anthropologist, editor, scientific journalist, PR consultant and operations director, combining an MA in environmental anthropology from University of Kent, UK with journalistic experience to achieve applied cross-cultural analysis across cultural, environmental, social and global aspects. Editorial experience includes trade media and online journalism, with particular speciality in technical articles, environmental issues, food, corporate social responsibility and commodities. Current research explores liminality, precarity as well as human adaptations and resilience responses to habitat modification in legislated landscapes.