Expertise:

biodiversity conservation; botanic gardens; neoliberalism; whale watching;

Language(s) spoken:

English, Portuguese, German, Spanish

Professional associations:

Lic. BA Honours; MA; PhD

Dr. Katja Grötzner Neves is (full) Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal. Her research traces the historical and recursive entanglements among economic phenomena, socio-anthropological dynamics, scientific knowledge, and political governance. Through her work, she examines how these spheres mutually shape and transform one another across time, revealing the deep interdependencies that underpin both modern and contemporary social formations.

Her 2019 book, Post-Normal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance (SUNY Press), investigates the role of botanical gardens since the sixteenth century as pivotal sites in the emergence of modern science, the expansion of European colonialism, and the consolidation of the modern nation-state. Engaging decolonial scholarship, the book also interrogates how botanical institutions continue to mediate global regimes of plant biodiversity governance today, often reproducing colonial legacies under the guise of conservation.

Neves’s current project, a literary ethnography of capitalism, care, and the ocean, extends her long-standing concern with the moral and material infrastructures of modernity. Using the transformation of whaling into whale watching in the Azores as an allegory for shifting human–whale relations since the early 1800s, the work examines the moral contradictions of sustainability and the entanglement of contemporary environmentalism with the extractive economies it seeks to transcend.

Across her scholarship, Neves combines historical analysis with ethnographic and literary sensibilities to explore how knowledge, value, and care circulate within global systems. Her work contributes to decolonial, environmental, and political anthropologies by revealing how practices of governance and imagination shape the possibilities of living ethically within an increasingly uncertain planetary future.

Visit this expert's Faculty Profile