My name is Emma Pask. My training is in anthropology, history, and science and technology studies. My research broadly investigates the relationship between techno-scientific practices of land-use, environmental fantasies, and statecraft. 

In my doctoral work at the University of Chicago, I conducted an ethnography of Texan bat scientists and, in doing so, ended up studying the science of Texas’s environmental stewardship, political myth-making, and historical storytelling primarily in the shape of “the range” and “species ranges.”

While at Aarhus, and as part of the “Settler Colonial Beasts” project, I will be doing research that further explores the historical formation of political-ecological imaginaries in the American West, including the frontier, the development of which concretizes the boundaries between landowning white-Anglo settlers and Indigenous, Mexican, and Black people.

Here, I am particularly interested in the traditions of range science at land grant universities in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, their treatment and management of animal diseases, and how this shapes human life on these lands.