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.”
The Datafied Animal in the Pitt Annual Research Report
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.
Graduate Recruitment
I am accepting graduate students for AY 26-27. I work with students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds whose research interests overlap with my own. Interested students may email me with any questions.
Courses
Anthropology of Science: Global Perspectives
Undergraduate seminar. Science and technology are integral to contemporary societies. Understanding how science is produced and how it shapes daily life is a crucial challenge for anthropologists, who have studied the production of scientific knowledge in labs, hospitals, field sites, and elsewhere. While early studies of science as a cultural practice focused primarily on the U.S. and Europe, science and technology are produced and consumed globally. Through analyses of case studies of biotechnology, medicine, genetics, conservation, agriculture, energy, climate science, and computing around the world, this class will investigate the global dynamics of science and technology. Juxtaposing readings on different scientific fields from around the globe, we will look for recurring themes that connect these studies. What happens when science and technology travel, and how do new places emerge as centers of knowledge production? How are culture, identity, technology, and science linked?
Core Course in Cultural Anthropology
Graduate seminar. This course in an intensive, graduate-level introduction to key theoretical paradigms in Euro-American sociocultural anthropology since the late-19th century. The purpose is to track some of the ways that the discipline has been shaped through specific debates, controversies and lines of inquiry. In the first half of the course we examine an evolving discourse on such topics as culture, function, society, structure, comparison, objectivity, materiality, symbols and signs, agents, history, change, practice, method, politics and anthropology’s status as a social science. And we consider how lines of inquiry that were formed at an earlier stage return later in altered form. Throughout the semester, partner readings will also destabilize “the canon,” calling attention to its construction, who is left out, and how the history of theory in cultural anthropology also bears the imprint of hierarchy, position and privilege. In the second half of the course we consider anthropology’s many “reflexive turns” moments when critical theory took a more central place in the discipline. Topics covered include gender and sexuality, race, knowledge, power, difference, decolonization, ontology and posthumanism.
Global Pharmaceuticals
Undergraduate seminar. This course examines pharmaceuticals as cultural and social phenomena, following their development, production, marketing, and use around the globe. We will investigate issues including the growing number of drugs prescribed to Americans each year, the lack of access some populations have to essential medicines, the increasingly global nature of clinical trials, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. We will use the study of drugs and medicines to analyze the production of medical knowledge, changing perceptions of health and illness, and the role of the state and the market in the development and distribution of therapeutics. Pharmaceuticals bring together science, clinical practice, marketing, and consumerism, and this course will draw on anthropological research to trace the role they play in global flows of knowledge, capital, commodities, and people.
Health and Environment in Pittsburgh
Undergraduate seminar. The city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding environs are exemplary sites for understanding the relationship between environment and health. In this course, we will use medical anthropology to systematically investigate the effect of the environment on health and the interplay of natural and human systems. Drawing on research in political ecology, this class will consider the social, political, and economic systems that shaped Pittsburgh and its inhabitants. We will pay particular attention to the way changing industrial and environmental conditions changed incidence of disease, and how exposure to risk and disease are shaped by race, gender, and class. We will examine issues like the histories of air pollution and resource extraction including coal mining, oil and gas drilling and their impacts on the environment and health. The course will examine how knowledge about health is produced and the development of new forms of citizen science that enlist local residents in projects to monitor issues like air quality.
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Undergraduate lecture course. What is culture and how does it shape human experience? This course will introduce students to the anthropological study of culture and society, including the history of the discipline, anthropological theory, methodology, and ethics. We will cover classic topics in cultural anthropology like ritual and kinship, as well as newer ones like science and globalization. The class will draw on case studies from a variety of settings, both familiar and distant, to examine the diversity of human social life. In the second half of the class, we will analyze how individual and group identities are developed and maintained and the construction of categories of difference such as race, gender, and nationality. We will discuss the relationship between agency and structure, examining how people are both unique, individual actors and products of larger social forces.
Medical Anthropology II
Graduate seminar. This course is a seminar in medical anthropology, focusing on the key theoretical perspectives and methodological problems that have characterized the subfield. We begin with an overview of the emergence of the field of medical anthropology from early studies of rationality and belief, moving on to analyze diverse medical traditions and understandings and experiences of the body, health, and disease. We will discuss contemporary theory in medical anthropology as well as the construction of research problems from different theoretical perspectives in medical anthropology. The course will address approaches within medical anthropology to the social construction of illness and healing, sex, gender, race, markets and bioeconomies, and global health and humanitarianism. The goal of the course is to prepare students to conduct their own research and to engage in contemporary scholarly debates within the subfield of medical anthropology.
People and Other Animals
Undergraduate seminar. What can anthropology tell us about nonhuman life forms? This class examines the interconnections between humans and other life forms, looking at how human cultural, political, and economic activities are shaped by the animal, plant, and microbial forms that surround us and likewise how these life forms are shaped by human activities. Topics addressed will include the interactions of humans and other beings in agriculture, domestication, hunting, scientific research, medicine, pet-keeping, and conservation. We will consider the subjectivity and agency of the nonhuman, our moral and ethical obligations to other life forms, and critically examine divisions between culture and nature.
Publications
Von Essen, Erica, Emily Wanderer, Gabriel Lennon, and Karin Ahlberg. (2025) “The Wild Workforce: Enlisting Non-Human Labour in Invasive Species Management.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241300941
Wanderer, Emily. (2024) “Bearly Recognizable: Facial Recognition and the Wild.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241304141
Wanderer, Emily. (2024) “Long Live the Lanternfly: Invasive Lifeforms, Extermination Campaigns, and Possibilities for Coexistence.” Tree News.
Wanderer, Emily. (2020) The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wanderer, Emily. (2018) “The Axolotl in Global Circuits of Knowledge Production: Producing Multispecies Potentiality” Cultural Anthropology 33(4): 650-679. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.4.09
Wanderer, Emily. (2017) “Bioseguridad in Mexico: Pursuing Security Between Local and Global Biologies.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(3): 315-331. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12339
Wanderer, Emily. (2015). “Biologies of Betrayal: Judas Goats and Sacrificial Mice on the Margins of Mexico.” BioSocieties 10(1): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.13