Fellow 2022-2023MIA BENNETT
Term: 04/2023 – 07/2023
Employment: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Geography, University of Washington; Assistant Professor, Dept. of Geography and School of Modern Languages & Cultures (China Studies Programme), University of Hong Kong (2018-2021)
Education: PhD, Geography, UCLA (2017), MPhil, Polar Studies, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge (2013), BA, Political Science and European Studies, UCLA (2010)
Fellowships: 2020-2021 Visiting Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, Doris Zimmern HKU-Cambridge Hughes Hall Fellowship, University of Cambridge (2019), National Science Foundation GROW Fellowship, University of Vienna (2017)
Major Research Grants: Collaborator: Navigating Convergent Pressures on Arctic Development (U.S. National Science Foundation, US$80,966), Consortium Member: JUSTNORTH: Towards just, ethical, and sustainable Arctic economies, environments, and societies (Horizon 2020, EU Framework Programme for Research, PI: Effects of Indigenous land rights on land use decisions (Regional Studies Association Early Career Fellowship, £10,000)
Recent Publications: Bennett, M.M. & Faxon, H.O. (2021) Uneven frontiers: Exposing the geopolitics of Myanmar’s borderlands with critical remote sensing. Remote Sensing 13(6): 1158; Kim, S.K., Bennett, M.M., van Gevelt, T., & Joosse, P. (2021) Urban agglomeration worsens spatial disparities in climate adaptation. Scientific Reports 11: 8846.; Bennett, M.M. & Iaquinto, B.L. (2021) The geopolitics of China’s Arctic tourism resources. Territory, Politics, Governance; Liu, C., Yang, K., Bennett, M.M., Lu, X., Guo, Z., Li, M. Changes to anthropogenic pressures on reach-scale rivers in South and Southeast Asia from 1990 to 2014, (2020) Environmental Research Letters 16: 014025; Bennett, M.M. (2020) Ruins of the Anthropocene: The aesthetics of Arctic climate change; Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111: 921-931.; van Gevelt, T., Zaman, T., George, F., Bennett, M.M., Fam, S.D., & Kim, J.E. (2020) End-user perceptions of success and failure: Narratives from a natural laboratory of rural electrification projects in Malaysian Borneo. Energy Research & Social Science, 59: 189-198.; Bennett, M.M., Stephenson, S.R., Yang, K., Bravo, M.T., De Jonghe, B. (2020) The Opening of the Transpolar Sea Route: Logistical, geopolitical, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts. Marine Policy (120): 104178.
Modeling the apocalypse: Satellites and spaceborne epistemologies of the end-of-times
At CAPAS, I propose to undertake a research project contributing to understandings of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic imaginaries. I seek to understand how catastrophes at a range of scales, from local disasters to planetary climate change, are imagined, depicted, and modeled with the aid of satellite imagery, and what effects these visualizations have on scientific and public understandings of the apocalypse. This research project has three objectives. First, the project seeks to situate satellite imagery within the history of epistemologies and visual cultures surrounding the apocalypse. Core to this objective is an understanding of satellite imagery as both scientific data and an art form that is central to contemporary scientific and visual cultures. Second, through an ethnography of science involving semi-structured interviews carried out in Germany and Austria, this research aims to explicate how scientists view satellite imagery and related models portending massive environmental changes, as well as how they communicate models suggesting catastrophic scenarios. Third, the proposed research will critique the role of satellites in constructing a specific view of Earth in the Anthropocene.