A view eastward from the Halde Haniel, a coal spoil heap in the industrial landscape of Germany’s Ruhr region. The corner of a white amphitheater appears in the lower left-hand corner. Diminutively sized human figures traversing the pit.

Anthropologist. Author.

Cynthia J. Browne is a social-cultural anthropologist, writer, and media practitioner and currently holds a position as a Research Scholar in Dept II, directed by Dr. Etienne Benson, at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Her research spans socio-cultural anthropology, German media studies, feminist science and technology studies (STS) and documentary practice, with a focus on the afterlives of resource extraction across differently situated bodies and landscapes.

She received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University in 2019.