Karen Bakker

Karen Bakker is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, where she is an Associate of the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.

A political economist and interdisciplinary scholar of environmental issues, she studies some of the most urgent sustainability issues of our time. Her early work focused on water, climate, and the privatization of nature. More recently, she has focused on the implications of digital transformation for environmental governance. She will devote her fellowship year to completing a book exploring how the tools of the Digital Age be might mobilized to address the challenges of the Anthropocene: reaffirming humanity’s relationship with nature and exploring new pathways for environmental conservation, while advancing multi-species socio-ecological justice.

Karen is the author of seven books, including The Sounds of Life (Princeton), Privatizing Water (Cornell), An Uncooperative Commodity (Oxford) and French Kids Eat Everything (HarperCollins). A member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Annenberg Fellowship in Communication (Stanford) and Canada’s Top 40 under 40. A graduate of McMaster University, she earned her PhD from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.