Our International Team
Lab Director
Meryl Shriver-Rice
Dr. Meryl Shriver-Rice is a digital anthropologist and environmental archaeologist, and Director of Environmental Media at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science Policy at the University of Miami. She developed and teaches for the Master’s of Environment, Media, and Culture program and is a founding editor (with Hunter Vaughan) of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Press).
Her research interests include digital technology and human behavior, paleoecology and ancient landscape studies of central Italy, the role of cultural values in wildlife conservation, science communication on social media, on-site media installations at archaeological sites, developed nation privilege and guilt, and issues of biodiversity in heritage projects. Dr. Shriver-Rice is the director of Biodiversity & Heritage for the Potentino Exploration Project, an interdisciplinary heritage project at Castle Potentino in Tuscany.
Affiliated Researchers
Adam Fish
Dr. Adam Fish is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media, at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, archaeologist, and documentary video producer who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. He has authored three books including Hacker States (MIT 2020, with Luca Follis), Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), and After the Internet (Polity 2017, with Ramesh Srinivasan).
His current research is focused on the use of drones in oceanographic research and is based on four years of collaboration with over 70 civic drone pilots, engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, and anti-drone activists in extreme locations around the world: e.g. volcanoes and coral reefs in Indonesia, wild elephant herds in Sri Lanka, and orca pods in the Puget Sound. The book, Drone Justice, will be published by MIT Press in 2021 and investigates how drones transform the ecologies and inhabitants of the Earth. He has completed a related documentary, Crash Theory, about the entanglements of crashing drones and endangered species.
Alison Anderson
Dr. Alison Anderson Professor in Sociology at the University of Plymouth, UK, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Australia. A founding member of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA), between 2014 and 2017 she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Communication.
She is author of Media, Environment and the Network Society (Palgrave, 2014) and Media, Culture & the Environment (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles on news media production and representation of environmental issues. She teaches a module on ‘Media, Culture and the Environment’ on the MA Environmental Humanities programme at Plymouth.
Follow her research on Twitter: @ProfAAnderson
Hunter Vaughan
Dr. Hunter Vaughan is A Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy. Prior to this he was the Environmental Media Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. He focuses on the environmental consequences and social ethics of screen media. His research interests include the role of environmental values in media production cultures, issues of environmental justice, reception studies of short-form environmental video, digital technology uses in heritage sites, and the potential role of embedding environmental values and green practices into film and media education and training.
Dr. Vaughan is the author of Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: the Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2019); was a 2017 Rachel Carson Center Fellow; and is a founding editor (with Meryl Shriver-Rice) of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Press). He is currently Principal Investigator, with Pietari Kaapa (University of Warwick), on the AHRC-funded Global Green Media Network, and is working on a collaborative research project to develop a zero-carbon future for global undersea cable networks.
Ros Donald
Rosalind Donald is a climate communication scholar and cultural historian, currently a postdoctoral associate in Environmental Justice and Communication at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Miami.
She researches the communication of climate change, using archival research and interviews to understand how climate knowledge becomes part of everyday life through research that includes TV weathercasts and local climate policy spaces.
She is particularly interested in how environmental policies have shaped the built environment and inequality, and her work explores how these insights can inform more equitable climate conversations and responses.
Her dissertation investigates how environmental policies and segregation together shaped the climate debate in Miami, forcing the city to contend with histories of displacement and dispossession alongside concerns about flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat.
Before she began her Ph.D., Dr. Donald was Deputy Editor of Carbon Brief, a U.K.-based climate and energy website. Follow her on Twitter: @RosDonald
Greg Warden
Dr. Gregory Warden is President and Professor of Archaeology at Franklin University Switzerland. His research has focused on archaeometallurgy, ritual studies, and the interpretation of material culture in the context of cultural landscapes. His current research also concerns heritage and the application of digital technologies to broader cultural contexts.
Greg is the Principal Investigator and co-Director of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project and excavations at Poggio Colla and Albagino. His work has been supported by the Kress Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is Executive Editor of Etruscan Studies, Vice President of the Etruscan Foundation, Consulting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, and an elected member the Istituto di Studi Etruschi e Italici. In 2012 the Republic of Italy awarded him the title of Cavaliere, Order of the Star of Italy, for contributions to Italian culture.
Nicole Starosielski
Dr. Nicole Starosielski is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the connections between media, infrastructures, and environments.
She is author of The Undersea Network (2015) and Media Hot and Cold, as well as co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (forthcoming), and the “Elements” series at Duke University Press.
Pietari Kaapa
Dr. Pietari Kaapa is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications at University of Warwick. His research explores the intersections of media and environmental concerns, especially in the field of media production and policy.
He has published widely on ‘ecocinema’ (including Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas, Bloomsbury 2014) and environmental media management (Environmental Management of the Media, Routledge, 2018). He is currently running the AHRC Network on Global Green Media Production with Hunter Vaughan.
Julie Doyle
Dr. Julie Doyle is a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Brighton, where she co-founded the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics), and was a member of the founding Board of Directors of the International Environmental Communication Association.
Julie’s research examines the role of media, visual communication and popular culture in shaping societal responses to climate change. Author of Mediating Climate Change (Routledge, 2011), she also works on collaborative research projects with artists and cultural educators to explore how creative communication can facilitate (youth) climate engagement and transformative learning about climate and system change.
Follow her research on Twitter @JulieDoylej
Catherine MacDonald
Dr. Catherine Macdonald is an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist who studies shark and ray biology, ecology, fisheries, media coverage, and conservation. Her research interests also include marine ecosystems, human-wildlife conflict, and wildlife tourism.
She is one of the co-founders and the Director of Field School, an interdisciplinary marine science training and education program, and a Lecturer and Track Coordinator for the Marine Conservation Track of the MPS program at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
Follow her research on Twitter @dr_catmac
Juliet Pinto
Dr. Juliet Pinto is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and the Science Communication Program in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focusing on environmental communication in international media is informed by her interdisciplinary background. She earned her doctorate in communication from the University of Miami, master’s degree in marine affairs and policy from the UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Boston University.
Dr. Pinto co-produced and wrote the award-winning documentary “South Florida’s Rising Seas,” the most watched online program for South Florida’s PBS affiliate in 2014. Her team’s multimedia work on communicating sea level rise earned the AEJMC’s 2015 award for Innovative Outreach to Scholastic Journalism.
Max Boykoff
Dr. Max Boykoff is a Professor and Director of the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Fellow at Cooperative Institute for Research into Environmental Sciences, and the co-founder and co-director of Inside the Greenhouse (an initiative to inspire creative climate communication) as well as co-founder of the Media and Climate Change Observatory (tracking media coverage of climate change around the world).
He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of California-Santa Cruz and Bachelor of Sciences in Psychology from The Ohio State University and is originally from Madison, Wisconsin.
Julia Wester
Dr. Julia Wester is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, who studies the psychological and social forces that shape environmental decision-making, with a particular interest in marine conservation. She is a co-founder of Field School, an innovative hands-on marine science education organization.
She is Executive Director of the Field School Foundation which education programming and research to engage a diversity of voices in conservation in south Florida. She previously received a Msc with Distinction from Oxford University and worked as a Legislative Aide focusing on South Florida environmental policy. Dr. Wester is an adjunct professor at the Abess Center where she teaches environmental policy.
Follow her research at @drjuliawester
Kate Moffat
Dr. Kate Moffat is a postdoctoral fellow based at the University of Warwick where her research examines the indigenous media sectors of Northern Europe and Canada. In addition to considering the nature of creative labour in an indigenous context, many of her research questions centre on whether these industries offer alternative approaches to sustainable film practice.
The aims are to reflect on what incentivises environmentally conscious screen production and management for these creative professionals, concerns which extend to the practical application of technology and how environmental issues are communicated visually and thematically. Dr. Moffat’s research is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Shireen Rahimi
Dr. Shireen Rahimi is an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, interdisciplinary environmental scientist, and National Geographic Explorer. She is the founder of Lightpalace, a visual media production company which focuses on telling stories about rapidly changing human relationships to the natural world. With her work, Rahimi uses experimental, embodied, aesthetic, and character-based storytelling to communicate the urgent and poetic nature of these dynamic human-natural realities. Rahimi has worked with algae fishers on the desert coast of northern Chile, coral reef communities in Cuba, and human-lionfish interactions in the Bahamas. Where the Sea Meets the Sky: Reflections on Human-Lionfish Relations in The Bahamas (forthcoming) explores human-lionfish interactions in The Bahamas through a combination of textual narrative storytelling, anthropological analysis, and photographs. Find her filmmaking on instagram @lightpalac.e
Mette Hjort
Dr. Mette Hjort holds multiple positions including: Dean of Arts at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Chair Professor of Humanities, Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, and Visiting Professor of Cultural Industries at the University of South Wales.
At HKBU she serves as Co-Chair of the Ethical and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence Lab, and has assisted with talent development at the alternative film school, IMAGINE, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, she was involved in mapping the provision of media training in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, for FilmLab Palestine, a collaborative undertaking involving the Danish Film Institute. Her research interests include the politics of talent development, including “twinning” projects on a North/South basis as seen in The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia, and Asia (ed., 2013), and African Cinema and Human Rights (co-ed., 2019). And her longstanding interest in small nations and film/media in Small Nation, Global Cinema (2005). Her contributions to the field of environmental media studies includes the article ‘What Does It Mean to be an Ecological Filmmaker? Knut Erik Jensen’s Work as Eco-Auteur.’
Ph.D. Students
Iago Bojczuk
Iago Bojczuk is a Ph.D. student from Brazil in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is broadly interested in exploring the intersections of digital technologies and sustainable development, especially in the context of Global South countries. His doctoral work investigates the socio-technical, policy, and cultural dimensions of Big Tech infrastructures in Brazil, especially as they relate to the expansion of data centers and the formation of cloud regions.
Iago holds a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he graduated as a Lemann Fellow in 2020. Before that, he earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Media Studies from the University of Oregon. He is currently a research assistant with Sustainable Subsea Networks, an academic-industry partnership funded by the Internet Society Foundation.
Marcus Reamer
Marcus Reamer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Miami’s Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental communication, political ecology, and marine conservation with a focus on the social dimensions of marine and coastal tourism. Marcus is a graduate assistant for the HyLo Team as part of the University’s U-LINK Doctoral Student Fellowship program. In this role, he supports interdisciplinary climate adaptation research that strives to reimagine decision making processes at the hyperlocal level, particularly in underserved communities.
He holds a Master of Professional Science in Marine Conservation from the University of Miami and a Master of Public Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was the Strategic Communications Director for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in Washington, DC.
Juliana Holanda
Juliana Holanda is a PhD student of Media and Communication at the Centre of Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK, in collaboration with Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Her current research focuses on Brazilian environmental coverage on sustainable development between 1992 and 2012, when Brazil hosted two United Nations conferences to discuss environmental sustainability. For this project, she was awarded a University of Warwick Chancellor’s International Scholarship.
Her past work focused on environmental communication. She has a MPhil in Media Studies from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, and a Master in Arts in International Journalism, completed with Distinction, from City, University of London, UK, which was sponsored by the European Union Programme AlBan.
Christine Pardo
Christine Joelle Pardo is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami. Her project is an interdisciplinary case-study of the species Zingiber spectabile, an ornamental herb from Malaysia that has spread into the understory of tropical rainforests in southern Costa Rica. For her dissertation research, she is investigating what characteristics make species invasive and how invasive plants can change the rainforest understory. She also will explore how local stakeholders’ value exotic plants and perceive the phenomenon of plant invasions. Her goal is to provide a more holistic understanding of plant invasions in tropical rainforests.
Follow Christine’s rainforest adventures:
Twitter: @ecoxtine
Katlyn Aviles
Katlyn Aviles is a filmmaker and researcher with a passion for storytelling. She earned dual degrees in Cinema Studies and Psychology at Burlington College and completed her MFA in Motion Pictures at The University of Miami. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication.
Katlyn’s research interests include feminist film theory, representations of the environment in media, and emerging technologies. Her creative work has screened at film festivals in the U.S. and internationally and have won awards. When she is not making films or doing research, Katlyn teaches film history to undergrads at UM.
Sam Johnson
Samuel Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the PhD program Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic Studies at the University of Miami. His dissertation, “Amazonian Narratives: Seeking Epistemic and Ecological Justice in the Anthropocene” traces the role of literary, film, and media production emerging from the transnational, intercultural space of the Amazon that preserves, shares, and uplifts of Indigenous ways of knowing and being while seeking justice for the multispecies communities of the Americas.
His research interests include indigenous studies, ecocriticism, climate change, human and non-human rights, social class, and the intersections of these themes in media, literature, and social media in Latin America.
Karen Backe
Pronouns: she/her/ella. Karen Backe is a Ph.D. student at the University of Miami’s Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. Her research investigates actionable strategies for building equity and diversity in STEM identity formation through storytelling and education policy. She studies designing serious games for positive impact.
Karen holds an MS in Marine Science from the Estuary and Ocean Science Center at San Francisco State University. Prior to her doctoral studies, she held positions managing communications for the environmental non-profit Ridge to Reefs; designing websites and interpretation of history and ecology with the National Park Service; conducting field operations with the United States Geological Survey studying climate change impacts in salt marshes; and engaging school communities in Los Angeles and Long Beach counties through ocean science education outreach with the Aquarium of the Pacific.
Graduated
Lisa Johns
Lisa Johns is a Ph.D. candidate at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. Her research focuses on how formal qualities and peripheral cues embedded in short-form digital storytelling impact environmental perceptions across various interpretive audiences. She is particularly interested in exploring how heuristic cues and different modes of engagement can be leveraged to elevate perceptions of scientific credibility and support for environmental policy surrounding climate change.
Her past work has focused on how marine-related aspects of climate change are represented in scientific journalism in the United States and the impact of fear-arousing imagery on social media user engagement.