Karen Bakker

Karen Bakker is a professor at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She studies the implications of digital innovation for governance and sustainability.

At Radcliffe, Bakker will be writing a book titled A Digital Green New Deal (MIT Press, under contract). Her current research project is situated at the confluence of two transformational trends: digitization and global environmental change. How are digital technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, blockchain, and digital bioacoustics) being mobilized to address biodiversity loss and climate change? What are the potential benefits and pitfalls? The project will also advance debates over multispecies justice by documenting emergent examples of digital technologies which enable nonhumans to influence and participate in environmental regulation. How might the tools of the Digital Age create novel possibilities for advancing nonhuman personhood and environmental rights?

Bakker is the author of more than 100 academic publications and seven books, including The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press, 2022). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists and a member of the board of Global Environmental Change. Her work has been recognized by numerous awards, including an Annenberg Fellowship in Communication from Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a BASc from McMaster University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.