Valerie Olson
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Olson is an environmental anthropologist who researches sociocultural dimensions of large-scale ecosystem science and governance in North America. Her projects focus on how remote and largely unpopulated environments, like outer space and ocean subsurfaces, become important sites in the production of new ecological knowledge, technologies, and politics. She is currently investigating the social organization, economics, and transboundary politics of marine ecosystem restoration in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2012 BP oil disaster.