Kelsey Merreck Wagner

  • Ph.D. Candidate & Department Research Assistant

Contact

406 Baker Hall

Research Interests

    Environmental anthropology
    More-than-human political ecology
    Visual anthropology
    Interspecies relationships
    Human-elephant conflict
    Community-based conservation
    Social & environmental justice
    Activist art
    Thailand
    Cambodia

Biographical Info

Kelsey Merreck Wagner is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology pursuing specializations in Animal Studies and Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change. She has a B.A. from Western Michigan University in Studio Art (2013) and an M.A. from Appalachian State University in Sustainability. (2018). She began fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand with ethical elephant ecotourism and community-based conservation, and later moved to Cambodia to explore interspecies relations and community conservation education. She is interested in human-elephant conflict and the effect of corruption and neoliberalism on conservation and environmental movements. Her current work uses art and activism to explore issues of human-elephant conflict and relations in Southeast Asian contexts.

Her recent environmental art is available at kelseymerreckwagner.com/portfolio
Dept. of Anthropology