Aida Arosoaie

Biography

Project: Sustainability and Anthropology

Advisor: Catherine Bolten

Aida Arosoaie is an environmental anthropologist whose work uses multi-sited mixed methodology—namely, archival research, oral history, ethnography, collaboration, and art-making—to examine the interplay between technoscience, resource extraction, racial capitalism, and postcolonial agendas of justice. By exploring the interrelations between natural rubber cultivation, tropical forestry management, and synthetic rubber production over the past century in Malaysia and beyond, Aida’s research grapples with the social, ecological, and geopolitical entanglements produced by competing modes of resource extraction. In doing so, she examines the contested notions of sustainability that emerge from within—and that radically transform—spaces of extraction. Aida holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the recipient of the 2025 Roy Rappaport Prize from the Anthropology & Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association and the 2025-2026 Genevieve Gorst Herfurth Award for Outstanding Research in the Social Sciences offered by the Sciences Divisional Committee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent work has been published in Environmental Humanities and Science & Education.