Jake Kosek’s research focuses on nature, politics, and difference, using conceptual insights from geography, anthropology, science studies, and theories of history to develop new approaches to natural history as both an object of critical inquiry and a conceptual tool. Through fine-grained, multi-sited ethnography and detailed archival research, he examines manifestations of natural history in the present, exploring contemporary taxonomies and varieties of nature, charting their resonance and discord with fossilized formations of prior natures. This includes: a social political history of the swarm, exploring how the flow of knowledge between bees and human collective behavior has remade discourses of modern citizenship and populations; an investigation of the biopolitics of criminality, weaving 18th- and 19th-century concepts of nature into contemporary bio-political discourses of law, race and justice; and a natural history of nanotechnology. Kosek is co-author of Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke University Press, 2003), which explores the intersections of critical theories of race and nature, and Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Duke University Press, 2006).

To learn more about Jake Kosek's research and publications, please visit his profile page at UC Berkeley Geography.