Katie Ulrich’s research and teaching concern the relationship between materials and knowledge, drawing on environmental anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and political economy/ecology. Ulrich’s current work examines how the environment, raw materials, and resources become meaningful in new ways as scientists develop technologies for making green or renewable products. This includes studying the commonsense assumptions about nature and production that underlie visions of circular bioeconomies and plant-based materials. This research is based in Brazil and the US, and has been published in Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, and Engaging STS. Find a full list of publications on Ulrich’s website.
Ulrich’s current book manuscript, Raw Materiality: Making Sugarcane into Sustainable Futures, focuses on the production of sugarcane-based biofuels, bioplastics, and other bioproducts in Brazil. The book follows scientists and agricultural actors who work to transform sugarcane into the raw material for these bioproducts, in turn transforming the crop’s long and violent history into sustainable futures. This transformation unfolds in a physical sense, as these actors carry out experiments to generate knowledge about and modify the plant’s biology and biochemistry, as well as a conceptual sense, as they make the plant imaginable, desirable, and even commonsense as a raw material for sustainability. Raw Materiality theorizes how the development of raw materials for renewable futures is also the development of raw materials for meaning-making around nature, production, and environmental and social change. The book advances the concept of raw materiality to articulate this convergence, demonstrating how the way we make our materials is the way we make ourselves.
Ulrich is also working on two new projects. The first is on biomanufacturing—the commercial-scale production of fuels and chemicals from agricultural biomass and wastes—in the US and Brazil. The second is on wastewater resource recovery in California, as part of a collaborative NSF project titled Retooling Extraction that explores shifting modes of extraction of and around water in response to anticipated challenges at the water-food-energy nexus.
Ulrich’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Rice University, Harvard University, the Brazilian Studies Association, and Haverford College. Ulrich received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rice University and a BA in Biology and Anthropology from Haverford College. Prior to starting doctoral studies, Ulrich worked as a research assistant in a molecular biology lab at the University of California San Francisco.