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Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

alice.rudge@ucl.ac.uk

Biography

I am a social anthropologist working at the intersection of language, science, and environmental politics. I am interested in how issues of environmental change are made material through everyday practices of care and maintenance, and I explore this question by triangulating research into Indigenous knowledge, more-than-human colonial histories, and speculative, future-oriented scientific practice and planning.

Batek and environmental change

Since 2014 I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Batek hunter-gatherers in Peninsular Malaysia. I have been interested in questions of how differences and similarities are made and transformed through people’s everyday lives as they experience ecological and social change. My book on this topic Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rainforest is forthcoming (2023) with University of Nebraska Press.

My current Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship investigates how environmental transformation might cause Batek people to speak about plants in new ways. Through exploring how people express ethical dilemmas surrounding plant personhood, I ask broader questions surrounding how humans might be reimagining plants in contexts of plantation agriculture. Concurrently, I hold a grant from the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, for a fieldwork project entitled ‘’. This project documents the sensory experiences involved in Batek weaving practices, and will allow me to examine how certain plants become intertwined with notions of identity and ethics.

In collaboration with Noa Lavi (Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²ÊÖÐÌØÍø) and Graeme Warren (UCD), I am also examining the figure of the hunter-gatherer in social and economic thought within the UK and Ireland. We are interested in challenging damaging perceptions of hunter-gatherers as antithesis and antidote to modern crises in popular debates, particularly as they occur in discourses on rewilding.

The Oil Palm

I work on tracing the moral lives of the African oil palm across time and space. I have conducted archival research at Kew Gardens, where I am interested in early colonial notions of ‘care’ for both oil palms and people, and how these linked with desires for control and colonization that were materialized through scientific and technical practices. In particular, I am interested in documenting the afterlives of these discourses in current public and scientific narratives on sustainability and environmntal change in relation to the oil palm.

Anthropocene Substitutions

In collaboration with Véra Ehrenstein (CNRS), I co-lead the project Anthropocene Substitutions. We are interested in how the language of climate change and sustainability are prompting scientists to reconfigure their work in new ways so as to create sustainable substitutes for our everyday materials. We have been conducting ethnographic research and interviews with leading synthetic biologists, biotechnologists, and metabolic engineers in order to understand how the micro-practices of scientific research into microbial cell metabolisms are related to sustainable development goals, national and international funding landscapes, industry investment, and political willpower. This allows us to ask questions regarding how sustainable futures are being envisaged through the metabolisms of microorganisms.

Research Interests

• environmental anthropology
• Indigeneity
• linguistic anthropology
• ethics and aesthetics
• multispecies relationships
• plantation agriculture and colonial Malaya
• sensory ethnography
• science and technology studies

Areas

Southeast Asia, Malaysia, UK

Books

Rudge, A. 2023 [in press]. . Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Peer Reviewed Articles

Lavi, N., Rudge, A., Warren, G. 2023 [in press]. Rewild your inner hunter-gatherer: How an idea about our ancestral condition is recruited into popular debate in Britain and Ireland. Current Anthropology. [].

Rudge, A & Ehrenstein, V. 2023 [in press]. From fossilised life to cell factories: Microbes, bio-waste and the logic of substitution in the petroeconomy. Review of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Studies.

Rudge, A. 2022. . Comparative Studies in Society and History. 64(4), pp.878-909.

Rudge, A. 2021. .ÌýJournal of Linguistic Anthropology 31(1), pp. 4-24.

Rudge, A. 2019. .ÌýAmerican Ethnologist 46(3), pp. 290-301.

Rudge, A. 2019. . Hunter Gatherer Research 4(1), pp. 3-23.

Rudge, A. 2019. . Ethnomusicology Forum 28(2), pp. 163-183.

Endicott, K.M., Lye, T.P., Zahari, N., Rudge, A. 2016. . Hunter Gatherer Research, 2(1), pp. 97-121.

Online Essays

Rudge, A. ‘. China Dialogue, 3 Jan 2023.

Rudge, A. & Vaugn, S. . Comparative Studies in Society and History Under the Rubric, 14 Dec 2022.

Rudge, A. ‘’. New Mandala, 4 July 2022.

Rudge, A. ‘’. The Ethnobotanical Assembly, 21 June 2021.

Rudge, A. & Ehrenstein, V. . Society and Space Magazine, 12 April 2021.

Rudge, A. . Edge Effects, 25 March 2021.

Rudge, A. ‘’. Allegra Lab, 1 October 2020.

Rudge, A.Ìý‘’. The Guardian, 2 December 2019.

Rudge, A. ‘’. The Conversation, 23 August 2019.

Rudge, A.Ìý‘’. British Library Sound and Vision Blog, 18 September 2019.

Rudge, A. ‘’. British Library Sound and Vision Blog, 13 September 2018.