Dr Sara Schroer

Sara is a Senior Researcher in Environmental Geography. She is a social anthropologist with a research focus on European environmental ethnography. Sara is passionate about research and research-based teaching that engages with the diverse politics, practices and experiences of human/environment relationships in landscapes of the Anthropocene. Over the years Sara’s research has included topics such as hunting, domestication, conservation, extinction, the anthropology of weather and atmospheres, ecological approaches to environmental perception/learning and more-than-human ethnography, with an ethnographic focus on avian worlds. She combines approaches from anthropology, the environmental humanities and science studies, using ethnographic, sensory and participatory methods. 

Sara joined the School of Geography and the Environment in December 2025. She has a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Prior to coming to Oxford, Sara held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (University of Oslo) and completed postdoctoral research as part of the ERC project Arctic Domus (University of Aberdeen).

The meaning of drought

Sara is PI of Living with Drought: Human-Environment Relationships in Drying European Landscapes (funded by ERC Starting Grant No. 101165175). Working across case studies in Spain, Germany, the UK, and Norway, 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-ecologial processes of drying as they manifest on different spatio-temporal scales. Drawing on anthropology’s distinctive strengths - in-depth ethnographic analysis and cross-cultural comparison - the project experiments with collaborative, sensory, and more-than-human research methods. Laying the empirical groundwork for a cultural theory of drought that integrates cross-disciplinary insights from anthropology, human geography, the environmental humanities, and the geosciences into cultural analysis, the project will generate ideas on the meaning of drought and how drying comes to matter unevenly in peoples’ lives and the wider ecological communities of which they are part. In doing so, this project will expand science-centred academic, political, and public debates on drought, emphasizing the importance of cultural theoretical insights for understanding and responding to global environmental issues.

Sara welcomes enquiries from individuals wishing to undertake doctoral or post-doctoral research in the areas of her expertise. Topics may include: wildlife conservation (particularly with view to scavengers, decay, and landscape aesthetics), human-animal relationships, more-than-human ethnography, geo-sociality, weather and atmospheres, politics and ideas of land management, ecological alternatives, and environmental perception.