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Natalie Forssman

PhD student, AURA

PhD Student AURA Natalie Forssman is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Program in Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. She is carrying out an ethnographic study of marine mammal research in California, where scientists work with shore-going seals as sentinels and indices of a changing ocean.  The research these scientists conduct involves intimate knowledge of coastal landscapes, animal behavior, and technological devices for sensing. This project examines the interactions among these different registers of everyday expertise. Natalie is developing a toolkit between multispecies ethnography, feminist science and technology studies, and communication and media studies in order to trace the choreographies between bodies, technologies, and landscapes involved in this biological research. She is particularly interested in questions of method, specifically in exploring resonances between descriptive methods from the human and life sciences, which share an interest in the interplays between materiality and sociality.