Our International Team
Lab Director
Hunter Vaughan
Dr. Hunter Vaughan is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy and Environmental Media Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. He focuses on the environmental consequences and social ethics of screen media and digital growth. His research interests include the role of environmental values in media production cultures, issues of environmental justice connected to digital infrastructure growth, and the potential role of embedding environmental values and green practices into film and media education and training.
Dr. Vaughan is the author, among numerous books and arictles, of Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: the Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (2019); he is co-PI (with Nicole Starosielski) of the Sustainable Subsea Networks project funded by the Internet Society Foundation, co-director (with Pietari Kaapa), on the AHRC-funded Global Green Media Network, and was founding editor (with Meryl Shriver-Rice) of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Press).
Affiliated Researchers
Meryl Shriver-Rice
Dr. Meryl Shriver-Riceis an assistant professor in the department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and Director of `Research at the Institute of American Indian Studies Museum. Prior to this she was Director of Environmental Media at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science Policy at the University of Miami, where she developed and taught for the Master’s of Environment, Media, and Culture program. She is a founding editor with Hunter Vaughan of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Press) and PI of the Coastal Heritage at Risk Taskforce (CHART), a decolonial climate justice project that re-stories and builds resilience at Indigenous, Black and Hispanic sites along the U.S. SE coast.
Her research interests include ethnobiology; Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR); anthropological approaches to environmental restoration; decolonial re-storying; historical ecology; Indigenous futures; Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK); coastal heritage at risk from climate change; and applied ethics in interdisciplinary environmental social science methods.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.