I am a Sociocultural Anthropologist who explores the global imaginaries of environment and sustainability. My research draws on political ecology to consider national parks, seed banking, and sustainable energy transitions in the context of social justice.

The global imaginaries defined by policy narratives beckon us to think about environmental problems like biodiversity conservation, food security and energy needs in modernist, economic terms. As an ethnographer, I witness and celebrate the mischiefs that can be worked upon these ethnocentric constructions, especially by people who see the same issues from other cultural perspectives that are shaped by grounded experience, by sociality, materiality, historicity, and by languages that affirm more-than-human kinships and affects.

• ANTH 210 Eating Culture: The Anthropology of Food
• ANTH 360 Ecological Anthropology
• ANTH 362 Energy & Sustainability
• ANTH 437 Gardens of Culture: The Anthropology of Food Systems

In my early work, I analyzed how powerful discourses about nature conservation can reproduce colonial and racist visions of culture and environment. Focusing on critical approaches to parks and protected areas, I looked at a contentious case on the island of Sardinia, Italy, during the period when European states sought to establish new national parks. My ethnography, Wild Sardinia, sought to complicate the global discourses of environmentalism by looking at the history of governance and development in highland Sardinia. Having returned periodically to extend research on agriculture, food systems and sustainability, I am currently studying controversies over the Mediterranean as a renewable energy frontier.

Biodiversity conservation at a broader scale, in relation to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, has been another interest of mine. This research examines diverse cultural projects of seed banking and seed saving, including the envisioned role of agricultural science, technology and institutions in international efforts to adapt to climate change.  I consider how world food security is shaped not only by changing environments, but also by how we frame understandings, ethical commitments and collaborations we articulate in response to them.

Selected Academic Papers

2025. Heatherington, Tracey. “Trickster Gastronomy: Eating the Earth and Resisting Dispossession on a Mediterranean Island” pp. 95-121 in Bernard C. Perley, ed., Remediating Cartographies of Erasure: Anthropology, Indigenous Epistemologies, and the Global Imaginary. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. UNP.  JSTOR.

2024. Heatherington, Tracey. “With Endless Articulations: Conserving Biodiversity in the Infinity Mirror” in Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 42 (1). Open access.

2021. Heatherington, Tracey. “Havens Against the Blight: Daydreaming Agriculture in the Future Past”, in Moveable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory, Virginia Nazarea and Terese Gagnon, eds., pp.199-222.  University of Arizona Press. JSTOR

2021. Heatherington, Tracey. “Fertility’s Fate: Agrarian Anxieties and the Social Life of Seeds”, in Seedways: The circulation, control and care of plants in a warmer world, Beppe Karlsson and Annika Rabo, eds. Series: Kungl. Konferenser 104, pp. 207-226. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Open access.

Selected Writing for a General Audience

2023. Heatherington, Tracey. “Unassisted Steering.” Creative Nonfiction. Special section: Hundreds for Katie. Anthropology and Humanism 48 (2): 432. Open access.

2020. Heatherington, Tracey. “Seeds” in The Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, pp. 404-409. Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, eds. Punctum Books. Open access.

2017. Heatherington, Tracey and Bernard C. Perley, “Fieldnotes from Svalbard: How Global Dreamings Take Root in the Arctic Frontier” Europe Now special feature on Facing the Anthropocene, Issue 7.  Open access.

Victor Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology (AAA), 2010.

Australian Anthropology Society Best Essay Prize, 2013.

I am excited to mentor students who are developing their own, independent, fieldwork projects based on ethnographic methods. Shared research interests can include case studies relevant to the climate and nature emergency, energy transitions, conservation debates, food systems, new technologies and the future of sustainability and development. I especially welcome inquiries from students whose ethnographic focus is grounded in Western Europe. Please read a little of my academic-facing work to assess the fit of research interests and approaches, before reaching out.

Current students: Davide Agus, Felix Giroux, Hilal Kina, Sofie Larsen-Teskey

Please join us for a research workshop that I co-organized with Bernard Perley, coming up at UBC on October 9, 2026: East/West, North/South: Green Capitalism and Green Colonialism in the Race to Net Zero, sponsored by the Jean Monnet Centre for Critical Infrastructure Studies, the Centre for Climate Justice, the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, the Centre for European Studies, and Anthropology.

Interdisciplinary engagements, including the ecological humanities and natural sciences, are vital to my work, and I have previously been a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and a Fellow at the Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

I participate in the editorial collective for an ongoing book series at the University of Arizona Press, Critical Green Engagements: Investigating the Green Economy and its Alternatives, and serve on editorial boards for two open-access academic publications, the Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology (ANUAC), and the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (AJEC), as well as the Scientific Committee of SOAS GLOCAL. Recently, I served as Chair of Special Projects & Publications (2023-25) for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. It is an honour to be part of these remarkable collaborations.

In spring 2021, I co-organized an interdisciplinary conference, Un/Predictable Environments: Politics, Ecology, Agency, with colleagues in Belfast and Allahabad. Thanks to funding from SSHRC and the Public Humanities Hub at UBC, our video archive and blog are available open access. Our special events, organized by an international team of fourteen students and faculty and one canine mascot, included four keynotes streamed from Delhi, Sydney, Toronto and upstate New York, film screenings, an art prize, and the launch of the Environmental Humanities Research Network at UBC.