Adam Wickberg

Adam Wickberg is a researcher in the history of media and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He received his PhD in 2016 from Stockholm University and the Research School in Cultural History. In 2013–2014 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. His thesis on the nexus of media, power, and politics in early modern Spain was published as a monograph titled Pellucid Paper: Poetry and Bureaucratic Media in Early Modern Spain (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018). 

Wickberg currently works with several scholars at KTH in the project The Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs, which explores the global environment as emerging through environmental data and asks how data gathering practices, data access, and data ownership shape environmental perception and politics. In this context, he is currently working on projects on ocean digitalization and precision agriculture. He also teaches courses on AI and Sustainability, The Anthropocene and Political Ecology at KTH. He is a member of the working group Anthropocene Formations and works with the research group Anthropocene Formations of Department I. 

Wickberg is co-editor of the book Environing Media (Routledge, 2022) which features essays from leading scholars of media and environmental humanities. The volume probes the new theoretical concept of “environing media” as an analytical tool that can account for how media produce environmental epistemologies in different historical times, and how humans come to act upon this mediated knowledge about the planetary environment they inhabit.

His research interests include media history and theory, digital cultures, AI, extractivism, digitalization and sustainability, history of science, environmental history, environmental and ocean humanities, and the Anthropocene.