Dr Laura Kuen

Laura Kuen is a postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment. A social anthropologist by training, her research explores multispecies relations and mutual sustenance through the lens of environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities. Having conducted research in rural Western Ukraine, she is interested in metabolic and caring relations between humans, animals, and environments, and in how people tinker with these relations in times of crisis and environmental change.

Laura joined the School of Geography and the Environment in 2026. She holds a PhD from Charles University, Prague. Her doctoral research was based on 8.5 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ukraine between 2021-2024, exploring small-scale farming and multispecies livelihoods in Transcarpathia. A central question of her research was what it means to “hold on to pigs” amid war and ecological change: how pigs are positioned within multispecies households, and how practices of self-provisioning and more-than-human care are sustained and reworked in the face of socio-political and ecological disruptions. Laura conducted her doctoral research in the context of the BOAR ERC project at the Czech Academy of Sciences, which explored the intersections of veterinary knowledges, African swine fever, hunting, and human–wild boar relations. Prior to her doctoral research, Laura studied social and cultural anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich and Environmental Studies at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Alongside her academic research, Laura works with visual and multimodal methods, including ethnographic documentary filmmaking and exhibition curation. She has made documentary films and curated exhibitions on various human-environmental relations, using these formats to communicate ethnographic research and environmental questions to audiences beyond academia.

Laura is a postdoctoral researcher on Living with Drought: Human-Environment Relationships in Drying European Landscapes (funded by ERC Starting Grant No. 101165175), led by Sara Asu Schroer. Working across several European case studies, the project investigates how people and communities learn to live with drought in a rapidly drying world. Together the case studies will explore memories, politics, and future imaginaries of life in drying landscapes, long dominated by large-scale hydrological infrastructures, industrial agriculture, and monocultural forestry. Crucially, this includes paying attention to how drought affects other-than-human life ways, and to the hydro-geo-atmo-ecological processes of drying as they manifest on different spatio-temporal scales. As part of the project, Laura conducts ethnographic research in rural Germany.