Advisory Board

Adriana Petryna is a professor of anthropology and director of the M.D.-Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research and writing on nuclear aftermaths, human subjects research, global health, and the climate emergency, she has explored diversity in the socio-political natures of science, how populations are enrolled in experimental knowledge-productions, and what becomes of ethics and citizenship in such processes. In addition to her co-edited volumes on global health, she is the author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton University Press 2002), When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press 2009) and Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change (Princeton University Press 2022).  

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Barbara Bodenhorn is an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. She has worked extensively on questions of environmental knowledge in Alaska and Mexico. Her research interests include learning processes related to knowing and conceptualizing the environment, 4th world politics and resource management, and questions relating to anthropological engagements with globalization, kinship, and economics.

Bruce Grant is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton 1995), a study of the Sovietization of an indigenous people on the Russian Pacific coast, and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009), on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination. He was co-editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke 2010). His current research explores the early twentieth-century, pan-Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905-1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it. He has been the recipient of grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, NCEEER (the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research), NEH, NSF, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He is a recent past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, interdisciplinary wing of the American Anthropological Association; and ASEEES, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Candis Callison is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She is the author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford University Press, 2020). Candis is a citizen of the Tahltan Nation (an Indigenous people located in what is now known as Northern British Columbia), an award-winning former journalist, a Trudeau Foundation Fellow, a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a regular contributor to the podcast, Media Indigena. She holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. 

Kath Weston is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia and British Academy Global Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (Columbia 1991, 2nd ed. 1997), a landmark study of the emergence of chosen families in the U.S. against the backdrop of the social movements of the 1960s-80s, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and a politics of coming out to “blood” relatives. Her honors and awards include the British Academy Global Professorship, two Ruth Benedict Book Prizes, NSF grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her other books include Render Me, Gender Me (Columbia 1996); Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (Routledge 1996); Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (Routledge 2002); Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor (Beacon 2008); and Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Duke 2017). Dr. Weston’s latest research brings her earlier work on kinship and embodiment forward through a focus on visceral engagement, while integrating material from political ecology, social studies of finance, and science and technology studies. She is now working on a book called, Why Does Capital Flow? Bodies–Finance–Medicine.

Alexander Kholodov is an Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Geophysics (University Alaska Fairbanks). His professional preparation includes receiving degrees of BS (1996), MS (1997), and PhD (2001) in Geology at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Alexander’s research focuses on a better understanding of the role of permafrost in the high latitude ecosystems and social domains. Over the last 25 years, he conducts research across the Arctic and Subarctic in Siberia, North-Eastern Europe, and Alaska which includes deep permafrost coring, monitoring of ground temperature and seasonal thawing, soil and ecological surveys for the purpose of studies of dynamics of ground thermal regime and interaction between permafrost and ecosystems. Since 2016 Alexander leads and participates in several NSF-funded projects aimed at studying of the influence of permafrost degradation on Alaskan rural communities. He publishes results of his work in Polar Geography, Ecosystems, Geophysical Research Letters, Environmental Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research.