Guntra Aistara is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy. She is co-founder of the Environmental and Social Justice Action Research Group, and previously directed the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Program at CENSE. Guntra is an environmental anthropologist, whose research interests include agroecology and organic agriculture movements, permaculture, agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty, the political ecology of small farmers' struggles over the control of land and seeds in the face of free trade agreements, and socio-ecological resilience of local food systems. Guntra holds a PhD from the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. Her dissertation was a multi-sited ethnography of organic agriculture movements in Latvia and Costa Rica and explored how culturally divergent traditions and practices surrounding landscape preservation, biodiversity conservation and seed production have shaped the two organic movements' strategies and responses to globalization and entry into regional free trade agreements.
Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art in Budapest. They hold PhDs from University College London and Essex University respectively, and work on the art history of Eastern Europe since 1945, environmental art history and contemporary art and ecological thought. Recent publications include Maja Fowkes’s The Green Bloc: Neo-Avantgarde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube (Translocal Institute, 2015). Reuben Fowkes is an editor of Third Text, and currently preparing a special issue on East European art of the 1960s and 70s. Their curatorial projects include the Anthropocene Reading Room (2014-6), the River School (2013-15) and the exhibition Walking without Footprints (2016).
Marianna Szczygielska is a visiting faculty at the Central European University, where she teaches at the Department of Gender Studies. She also co-chairs a strand at GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies and is an affiliated researcher of “The Seed Box. Environmental Humanities Collaboratory” (Linköping University). Marianna holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University. With a background in philosophy, her research interests include environmental humanities, animal studies, queer theory, critical race studies, and feminist science and technology studies. She has published on zoos and gender, scientific research on hormones, and co-edited a special journal issue on relations between affect, transgender, and animal studies. Marianna's new project explores how colonial trades in elephants and ivory to Eastern Europe shaped understandings of wildlife conservation and further informed larger structures of identity formation.
Alan Watt is Assistant Professor, CEU Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy. His research interests lie in the areas of environmental ethics and sustainable lifestyles. He has been Assistant Professor at the CEU Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy since 2001, and was Head of Department 2010-15.Prior to joining CEU, Dr. Watt taught at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (Ukraine); at the Jozsef Attila University, Szeged (Hungary); and at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). He has a B.A. in politics, philosophy,economics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Warwick University.
Hyaesin Yoon received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Her areas of interest include transnational biopolitics, postcolonial criticisms, critical animal studies, and feminist STS, as well as performance and literary theories. Her present focus is on how technological assemblages of humans and other animals mediate the power relations of sex/gender, race, disability, and species in a transnational context. She is currently working on her book project Prosthetic Memories, examining the ethics of embodied memory in an age of transnational mobility and biotechnology by examining the diasporic tongue (as both language and organ), animal cloning, and human stem cell research across the United States and South Korea. She is also incubating her next project, tentatively titled Feral Affect, which explores how (bio)technological assemblages of human/animal bodies perform (and potentially disturb) border technology.