Cynthia Jean Browne

Cynthia Browne’s research spans anthropology, media studies, science and technology studies, and documentary practice, with a focus on the afterlives of resource extraction across differently situated bodies and landscapes. Recent publications have addressed collaboration within documentary practice, and materialist approaches to landscape and its role in knowledge formation and collective action in mining regions of Germany. Her current work focuses on exposure as a documentary practice that has been foundational to certain forms of environmental knowledge, as well as integral to efforts by collectives to provide counter-documentation in order to disclose relationships between trajectories of environmental exposure and legacies of colonialism and racial privilege.

Cynthia Browne received her doctorate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University in 2019. Currently, she is a Research Scholar within Department II “Knowledge Systems and Collective Life,” where she is part of the Working Group “Environmental Knowledge in Times of Crisis.”

In 2022, she received a Heinrich Winkelmann scholarship from the Bergbau (Mining) Museum in Bochum, Germany; in 2020–2021, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany (formerly known as the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies). Previous research affiliations include the Graduate Research Training Group “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Sensory Ethnography Lab in Cambridge, MA, among others.