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Mascha Gugganig

Dr. Mascha Gugganig

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Mascha Gugganig is a social and cultural anthropologist, a science and technology studies (STS) scholar, and a curator for research exhibitions on contested agricultural and food technologies—including biotechnology, indoor vertical farming, and digital tools—as well as “smartification” more generally. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of British Columbia (2016) for which she researched (everyday) expertise in articulations of education (being/getting educated) on GMOs at a Hawaiian-focused charter school, the agricultural biotechnology industry, and an anti-GMO social movement on the settler-colonial terrain of Kauaʻi/Hawaiʻi. Subsequently, she was a predoctoral fellow of the Program on Science, Technology & Society at Harvard University (2014–2015), and later a visiting fellow at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University (2019–2020).

Her postdoctoral projects include:

  • “Cultivating Engagement: A Citizen Participation Forum on Vertical Farming” (Technical University of Munich, funded by EIT Food, 2017–2018);
  • “Innovating Food, innovating Europe?” (funded by the German Research Foundation/DFG, 2019–2023);
  • “Diversity by Design: Emergent Agricultural Technologies for Small-Scale Farming” (co-leader with Kelly Bronson, University of Ottawa, 2021–2022).

Mascha is a lecturer and researcher (akademische Rätin) at the Chair of Life Sciences in Society at LMU and the BIOTOPIA Biodiversity Museum, and an associate of the Rachel Carson Center, where she will also offer courses.


Selected Publications:

  • with Kelly Bronson. “Digital Agriculture and the Promise of Immateriality.” In Food Studies: Matter, Meaning, Movement, edited by David Szanto, Amanda Di Battista, and Irena Knezevic, 648–664. Ottawa: Food Studies Press, 2022.
  • “Hawaiʻi as a Laboratory Paradise: Divergent Sociotechnical Island Imaginaries.” Science as Culture 30, no. 3 (2021): 342–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1884217.
  • with Rachel Douglas-Jones. “Visual Vignettes.” In Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Security Infrastructures, edited by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Pöchhacker, and Geoffrey C. Bowker, 215–36. Manchester: Mattering Press, 2021.
  • with Sophie Schor. “Multimodal Ethnography in/of/as Postcards.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 3 (2020): 691–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13435.