Nicholas is an anthropologist and a visiting scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. His first book, Concrete Dreams:  Value, Practice, and Built Environments in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires, will be published in Fall 2019 with Duke University Press. 

Kali is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University in the Humanities Research Center. She has a PhD in Anthropology from University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies the environmental impacts of war in Iraq. Her book project, Counter-resurgency: Ecologies of Coercion, examines how Anbari farmers struggle to survive the rearrangement of their landscape by transnational counterinsurgency projects. Her current ethnographic research explores how the concrete industry in post-invasion Iraq enforces global regimes of race, class, and cartographies of power, as well as regimes of environmental extraction and degradation.

Timothy is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Walshe, Olafur Eliasson, Haim Steinbach, and Pharrell Williams. He co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. His work has been translated into 9 languages. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

Allison is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rice University Humanities Research Center, where she is a participant in the yearlong seminar, “Waste: Histories and Futures.” She completed my PhD in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Allison writes and teaches about eighteenth-century literature and culture, Romanticism, the environmental humanities, global studies, and the history and theory of the novel.

Lupe is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Based on the Texas-Mexico border, their work examines the ways in which binational development and border militarization projects manifest and become entangled through sociomaterial processes. They are interested in the myriad ways biotic communities construct, resist and interact with an increasingly concretized border and maintain its physical and ideological forms while thinking and working toward often incompatible futures for the
region.

Sarah is a doctoral fellow in the history and theory of architecture at ETH Zurich and a visiting studio critic at Rice University. Her dissertation is a history of concrete in Switzerland from the mid 19th century to the oil crisis. She also works independently as an architectural designer on buildings and urban-scale projects. Her current work includes a soon-to-be completed weekend house in Germany's Black Forest, together with Nils Havelka, and a house for boat builders in Kerikeri, New Zealand. Sarah is the editor of Rematerializing Construction: 22 Propositions and Reform! Essays on the Political Economy of Urban Form, together with Marc Angélil. Essays on, respectively, whale taxidermy and the Swiss cement cartel have been published in San Roccoand Grey Room. She holds an Advanced Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Gebby is a PhD student in Rice University's anthropology department. His project investigates South Korea’s ambitions to become a leader in what is called the global carbon market—a financial system designed to produce and trade carbon emission offsets by quantifying and valuing carbon stored within terrestrial environments. More specifically, Gebby’s research centers on ongoing efforts to understand and govern the distribution of carbon sequestered in South Korea’s world-renowned coastal mudflat habitats, referred to as blue carbon. Gebby studies how South Korea’s attempts to leverage blue carbon within global carbon markets animate an unremarkable material—mud—as well as the breadth of social and ecological processes which constitute it, with qualities integral to the preservation of state sovereignty and the stabilization of a world climate more broadly.

Smoki is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research and was Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at University of California, Irvine. Her research focusses on the anthropology of money and value; speculative bubbles; anthropology of corruption; postsocialist transformations; cultures of Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. She is co-author of Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion and Design (Berghahn Books 2018) and author of Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania (Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

Siddharth is an architect and PhD student in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation research project looks at an ethnography of concrete as a house building material in Kochi, Kerala to understand the processes through which concrete is becoming a ubiquitous construction material across urbanizing South Asia, and the impacts of the same on local people and environments.

Laurin’s research focuses on questions of urban infrastructure, humanitarian design, and architectural and infrastructural implementations. He plans to carry out new fieldwork in urban South Africa and proposes to analyze the lived experiences of experts, such as urban designers and architects and other private and non-governmental agencies, and learn about the stakes involved in design work. Before joining Rice, Laurin pursued graduate studies in Anthropology at University of Florida and earned an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Leipzig University. He came to Anthropology through undergraduate training in Philosophy and African Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Mel is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Interested in the nexus of form, environment, and design, Mel’s dissertation research is focused on architectural interventions in the deep ravines (los barrancos) that compose nearly half of Guatemala City. Asking how ravines are contested spaces in Guatemala City’s development, she works with architects, urban planners, and policy makers to examine how differently situated experts design and call into view contesting urban and sustainable futures. Although interested in the knowledge practices of design, her work contributes to research on land, public space, and property in postwar Guatemala.

Jon is a mechanical engineer, trained at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the director of operations for the international nonprofit, Make Life Skate Life, which supports international grassroots skateboarding by building community skateparks in communities around the world.

Alfonso is an undergraduate architecture student at Rice University. Born in Mexico City, he was exposed to people and projects that aspire to use architecture as a tool of social outreach. The way built space precludes or opens possibility for social life has become the main focus of Alfonso's work.