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Eunice Blavascunas is an associate professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Whitman College, Washington. Her research areas include environmental anthropology, nature conservation, posthumanism, rewilding, and borders. In particular, she studies how humans recover ecologies, use forests, and conserve nature with a focus on nationalism, posthumanism, and postsocialism. The abiding concern of her scholarship has been cultural change—how do people shift identities, especially where border-crossing people and unresolved pasts trouble the way forests are used and protected. She is the author of Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest (Indiana University Press, 2020). Her research, teaching, and writing have been funded by Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Rachel Carson Center.
RCC Research Project: Freeing the Forest: The Asynchronization of Partisan Ecology and Asylum Politics at the Polish-Belarusian Border
Selected Publications:
- “Europe as Hyperbole: Conceptual Tensions and Animal Agency in the Rewilding of Europe” [Europa com a hipèrbole: Tensions conceptuals i agència dels animals en la renaturalització d’Europa]. In “Conservation of Nature as Landscape Design” [La conservació de la natura com a disseny del paisatge]. Ed. Oriol Beltran and Ismael Vaccaro. Special Issue, Revista d'Etnologia de Catalunya, no. 47 (2023): 119–33. https://doi.org/10.57645/10.8080.06.2.
- with Benjamin Cope. “The Wild Border of Politics: The Białowieża Forest and Changing Ecologies of Protest.” Ethnologia Polona 43 (2022): 159–77. https://doi.org/10.23858/ethp.2022.43.3006.
- “Depriving the Far-Right Unity.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 29, no.2 (2021): 341–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13055.
- Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest. Indiana University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14npjz4.
- “In the Mud and of the Mud: New Materialities for Eastern European Rural Societies.” In “Contracts“ [Verträge]. Ed. Erich Landsteiner and Margareth Lanzinger. Special Issue, Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 25, no. 2 (2017): 305–9. https://doi.org/10.7788/ha-2017-0207.