ABOUT ME

Megan Maurer, PhD

As a researcher, I focus on the relationships between people and plants in cities. My scholarship addresses concerns about urban life in an era of socioeconomic and ecological precarity by exploring the connections between city-dwellers’ desires for well-being, and their aesthetic and ethical preferences regarding the urban environment. Through an attention to the intersections of class and race in urban life and environments, my work seeks to increase social equity, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability in US cities. 

​My scholarship is rooted in cultural anthropology, environmental humanities, and human geography. My research engages work on the social and spatial production of cities, critical infrastructure studies, multispecies ethnography, urban political ecology, and feminist science and technology studies—particularly concerning care and affect. 

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I earned my PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Kentucky in 2017.