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Katy Overstreet

PhD student, AURA

Katy Overstreet is a PhD student in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is a collaborator and researcher on the AURA team. Her dissertation research is on the human-cow interactions and landscape-making practices that undergird milk-production in Wisconsin, USA. Dairy farming requires a working relationship between people and cows—not simply the latest tools, hormones, or technologies. Pressures to modernize farms and a sense of moral obligation to “feed the world” bring desires to care for cows into tension with goals for ever-increasing productivity. As farmers and experts design ways to feed, house, and manage the manure of their cows, land management becomes a form of cow care. Katy’s dissertation therefore examines how the values and practices of cow care are entangled with the production of landscape and milk.