Sreya Ann Oommen is a Postdoctoral Environmental Humanities scholar and UNESCO BRIDGES Flagship Hub coordinator. Her research focuses on Island Literary Studies, Critical Ocean Studies, Decolonial Studies, and Sustainability Studies. Oommen’s current research problematizes the perception of islands within pre-established frameworks that restrict the authentic representation of the historical, social, and cultural realities of island communities. Her research examines the definitions of islands, islandness, and placeness to conceptualize the analyses of literary texts. Oommen’s current research also addresses futures literacy, energy humanities, environmental justice, and community benefits planning. She has published articles on Anglo-Indian Studies, Human Rights Literature, and Ecocriticism.

William Gleason is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in environmental humanities, children’s literature, and popular culture, and is affiliated with the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Program in Environmental Studies, and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is the author of Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature and The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, and co-editor of Keywords for Environmental Studies (with Joni Adamson and David N. Pellow), Romance Fiction and American Culture (with Eric Murphy Selinger), and The Pocket Instructor: Literature (with Diana Fuss).

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor, jointly appointed between the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Trained in molecular biology, food chemistry, the culinary arts, and food studies (Ph.D., NYU), Spackman’s work examines how the design and technological manipulation of sensory experience shape how people use, value, and react to the ingestible environment. She specifically focuses on how sensorial interactions shape individual and societal governance practices, with the aim of exploring what new futures might become possible if new approaches to shaping taste and smell emerge. She employs a theoretical and methodological commitment to critique and intervene in current practice at multiple scales. These interventions are grounded in offering alternative pathways forward for practitioners and the public in making better futures. To do this, Spackman draws together art and science throughout her work of 1) identifying how Sensory Ecologies function and impact health and well-being; 2) building awareness of and exploring how Sensory Labor and Politics function; and 3) developing new approaches to examine how sensing shapes Environmental Futures. Author of multiple papers, public-facing articles, and co-director of ASU’s art|science festival of futures, Emerge, Spackman is currently is finishing a book manuscript with the working title Making Nothing. You can find her on twitter: @christyspackman; or on the web: christyspackman.com. Otherwise she is probably in her research kitchen making flavorful futures.

G. Mauricio Mejía is an associate professor of design at Arizona State University. He explores design approaches to change behaviors, transform systems, and envision desirable futures. His current research and practice are related to diverse areas of application including health, sustainability, and business innovation. Dr. Mejía studies and works with emergent and strategic design practices such as visual sense-making, interaction design, service design, organizational design, and design futures. He received a PhD in Design from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a Master of Design degree from the University of Cincinnati.

Owain gained an MSc (Society and Space) and PhD in Cultural Geography at the world-leading Department of Geography, University of Bristol 1993-1997. Conducting post-doctoral research at Bristol, Exeter, the Open University and other institutions, in a series of RCUK funded projects, we has studied and written about many aspects of nature-society relations including; landscape, place  and memory;  the environmental crisis;  children’s geographies; and transformative theories of pragmatism and non-representation. He has conducted research projects on  water and society (floods, tides, coastal cultures);  trees, place and landscape; and childhood, memory, nature and place. He led a £1.5 million Art and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities project which involves eight UK universities, and numerous community partners and artists in four case study areas across the UK. This project sought to creatively explore and transform connections within and between communities, and communities and nature, in relation to water issues. Owain was appointed as the first Professor of Environmental Humanities in the UK in 2014 at Bath Spa University, and was deputy director of the Research Centre for the Environmental Humanities 2016 – 2019.  He has published/co-published over 90 scholarly articles and five books;  Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide: Embodiment, performance, practice (2023),  with Anna Pigott, and Ben Parry; Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago: Imagining Islands (2018), with Ysanne Holt and David-Martin-Jones; Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (2017), with Michelle Bastian, Niamh Moore and Emma Roe; Geography and Memory: Identity, Place and Becoming, (2012), with Jo Garde-Hansen;  Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees, and Trees in their Place (2002), with Paul Cloke. He has successfully supervised four Environmental Humanities PhDs with art practice.

Jennifer Richter is an assistant professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where she is also a senior global futures scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She studies how policies that govern innovations and research are created and then taken up by local populations, especially in the American West. Her research focuses particularly on energy justice, specifically related to the cul­tural, social, and environmental issues that come with larger energy transitions. She coedited the book Environmental Realism: Challenging Solutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).