Affiliated Fellows

Matthew Libassi is a researcher and educator interested in the relationships between people, nature, and power. His work focuses on natural resource use, conflict, and governance, as well as more broadly on uneven human experiences of environmental change. Matt’s current project analyzes the politics of gold mining in Indonesia. He examines how contemporary modes of resource extraction have been historically produced and how they are experienced, engaged with, and contested by neighboring communities. In particular, he is interested in the growth of small-scale, unlicensed mining and the ways its participants are resisting or demanding incorporation into formal resource policies. Matt holds a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley and a BA in International Studies from Vassar College.  

Jake Silver is a cultural anthropologist who works with Palestinian astronomers, city planners, GIS experts, and activists to study the contemporary dimensions and volumes of Israel’s occupation. His work shakes our understandings of the sky as a stable environmental object and instead approaches how politics and political conflicts bring it into being, creating multiple skies that we each experience differently. In so doing, he hopes to offer new frameworks for grasping colonial settlement that best address its reaches and contours (sometimes far above our heads) today. Email: js3342@cca.rutgers.edu