Emily Wanderer

• Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

Emily Wanderer is a cultural anthropologist who uses ethnographic research to study the environment, health, technology, non-human animals, and Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from MIT's program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society.

Research Description
Her current research, supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, examines the datafication of wildlife. Over the past few decades, scientists have developed an ever-expanding network of technology for tracking and monitoring wildlife. This network includes animal-borne tags, autonomous recording devices, and other sensors, as well as machine learning and AI tools. Her research examines how these tools have changed the way animal life is tracked, quantified, and understood and the broader impact of datafication and AI on conservation, animal management practices, and ecology as a science. Through ethnographic research, she investigates how AI and other emerging technologies are reformatting human relationships with animals. Implicit in tech for conservation initiatives is often the idea of a better Anthropocene for nonhumans, one in which the human impact on the world is used to improve ecological systems. While the Anthropocene represents an unintended and unplanned transformation of ecosystems and lives, this project considers how a better Anthropocene calls for the cultivation of even animals categorized as“wild.”

Her first book, The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico (California, 2020) is on the politics of nature in Mexico. In it she examines biopolitics and biosecurity beyond the human, analyzing how scientists studying ecosystems, agriculture, and infectious disease thought about and manage the relationships between humans and nonhuman life forms. The Life of a Pest was a finalist for the 2022 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

• –present Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

• 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society

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