Collective

At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Arnošt Novák converted to anarchism and become involved in anarchist activities through literature and reading the rebel generation’s poems. He lived in the Ladronka squat, where DIY cultural and political events were organised and also participated in post-revolutionary samizdat publications such as Autonomie and Konfrontace. To complete his education and expand on his critical thinking, he began his studies at university at the age of 26, achieving a PhD. in Environmental Studies, and eventually ending up as a lecturer and assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cambridge. He wrote the book Dark Green World. Radical Environmental Activities in the Czech Republic after 1989 (2017, in Czech) and has published extensively in journals such as Social Movement Studies, Journal of Urban Affairs, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Social Studies, Contradictions and International Relations. Since he thinks that another world is not only possible but also necessary, and that it will eventually be as the world is constantly transforming, he continues to have one foot politically engaged in anti-authoritarian activities and the other in academia. This uncomfortable position allows him to counterbalance the activist stance with the critical distance offered by the social sciences, and in turn to complement the cool detachment of the seemingly objective researcher and academic with a passion for the topics under investigation.  

When he was looking for a nail to hang a tennis racket on, Bob Kuřík (he/him) found it on the belt of Wallachian DIY punks. He grew up with them, as well as with hills and books. Through their interactions he acquired a rebelliousness that he went on to develop and explore in anti-fascist Prague, Zapatista Mexico and post-autonomous Germany, as well as at Durham University in England, the University of California in Los Angeles and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Despite the fact that he read in his bachelor’s thesis review that he was an unassimilable or uneducable individual whose education was not worth pursuing further, he is still active in the university environment today—as an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. With Jan Charvát, he edited the book Mikrofon je naše bomba. Politika a hudební subkultury mládeže v postsocialistickém Česku (The Microphone is Our Bomb: Politics and Youth Music Subcultures in Post-Socialist Czechia, 2018, in Czech), and with Ondřej Slačálek and Dagmar Magincová, he edited the book Nečekáme nic od reforem: Kapitoly o českém anarchismu (We Expect Nothing from Reforms: Chapters on Czech Anarchism, 2024, in Czech). He has published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Communications and The SAGE Handbook of Resistance. He dislikes Nature—all the more reason to fear and at the same time to hope for more-than-human resistance.

Christopher Kelty is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the department  of Anthropology and department of Information Studies. He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in Science, Technology and Society (now HASTS) in 2000, for a dissertation on the impact of the internet on healthcare organizations. Since then he has written on a range of topics at the intersection of technology and social/political theory. He wrote one of the first in-depth studies of free and open source software production and its relation to the public sphere, Two Bits (Duke University Press, 2008) and several articles about the nature of freedom and internet-based technologies and their relationship to concepts and practices of openness in liberal democracies. He has written about the nature or responsibility in engineering design, especially in the field of nanotechnology. He has published extensively on the problem of participation in new internet and social media platforms, and has  written an historical ethnography about the concept and practice of participation The Participant (University of Chicago Press, 2019). He has researched and written occasionally about hackers, pirates, activists, libertarians, trans-humanists and other creatures who inhabit the political landscape of technological innovation. More recently he has extended his interests to include non-human animals. As the head of the Labyrinth Project and has been conducting fieldwork with pest-controlprofessionals,  wildlife managers, biologists and veterinarians in Los Angeles, on questions related to cats, coyotes, arbitrariness, rats, wetlands, domestication, grass, poison, concrete, relocation, raccoons, working class politics, mountain lions, and also Satan. Outside of academic work, Kelty has been a long-time activist for open access publications and open access policies for academic control of publication rights and processes, including by leading the passage one  of the first open access policies for the entire ten-campus University of California system. He co-created (with Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff) the scholar-led, innovative scholarly magazine Limn and he was a founding member of the Libraria collective which continues to fight for scholar control of publishing practices in Anthropology, science studies and related disciplines.

Doubravka Olšáková, for a long time worked as an old (senior) researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History of the CAS, but then she decided to change her tribe and since 2025 she has been working fully and completely at the Institute of Political Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. She is interested in the history of science and technology and how it all interacts with nature (as historical experience says, sometimes for better, but usually for worse). She has written about Stalin's cult of the remaking of nature and now writes about global experts global-wise and Prague mothers local-wise. She wants to write about animals, like the mandolin (did you know that Ferd the Ant is biologically a girl?). She is trying to shift away from "pure" history, including the environmental one, towards the social context and political implications of human's use of science and technology. She understands the term "technological trick", as Václav Havel renamed the original technical term "technological fix", as limitations to human imagination and hope. However, she does not yet understand to what extent the technological fix is a hope for other forms of life on Earth, beyond the biological life.

Klára Soukupová (she/her) is a philosopher disenchanted with questioning the essence of being. She is now looking for ways to translate the realm of ideas into the transformation of a more just more-than-human society. She began to anchor her aversion to capitalism, built as a teenage employee at mcdonald's, in theory, and practice while studying in Berlin and Bologna through activism and politically engaged studies. Animal rights have been a theme that has guided her through her studies and life. In activist movements dealing exclusively with human issues, she has noticed a reluctance to include more-than-human justice as a valid demand to strive for, while working in an NGO defending animal rights, she has noticed racist and sexist tendencies. Frustrated by the unwillingness to see human and more-than-human oppression as interconnected, she thus decided to engage in a class analysis of animal labour in her master's thesis in gender studies, connecting it to other exploited (human) labours in the capitalist society and asking what a multi-species labour movement might look like.

If one can fall for activism through the pages of books, Jakub Kvizda is pursuing that path with persistence and passion. As a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, he primarily challenges established conceptual frameworks as part of the ResisTerra project. His blue suits may be gathering dust in the closet, but they’re not entirely forgotten yet – alongside his research into resistance, he also untangles the complex threads of contemporary governance and bureaucracy. Trained in anthropology and socio-cultural ecology, he continues to explore debates in the natural sciences as well, bringing in bold speculations based on his fieldwork experience. Frosty music in his ears accompanies him on a quest, both personal and professional, for refuge from the climate disruption where he feels most at home - in the hills and mountains. 

A dead elderberry on the edge of a overfertilized field. An unhealthy beech tree on an marlite hillside. A loess ravine whose life is endless erosion. Terry humanly interprets all this for the Resisterra project, only to add: it is an attempt at the inhuman. And he's been dealing with the inhuman since elementary school, where his interest in the landscape and the profaned, verbally abused "nature" transcends into chronic professional excitement, or inflammation. For a long time, over 20 years, he has been involved in nature conservation and deconstruction, mapping, research and, most importantly, the application of scientific knowledge in landscape practice. He now attempts to interpret the inhuman at the Faculty of Humanities, but before that he carried firewood into the forest at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. He is a co-author of multiple publications, e.g. The Prague Planet (2022, in Czech) or Geobotanical and phytocenological assessment of a selected area of the CSA quarry (2018, in Czech). He has a soft spot for invasive species and their foibles, for the beautiful ochre patches in the grey gossamer of our post-communist cities, for the lumps of over-poisoned landscape in the suburban stool, and his head is as clear as the fragrant, clean toilet in the granite frames of the Sudetenland. And the fundamental values? Rehabilitation of the post-industrial landscape! And the end of post-romantic blindness! 

While studiying Spanish and English translation in Banská Bystrica, Lucia has found out that interpreting worlds through spoken language is just one of the gestures that make them visible. Becoming with teritorries known as Spain, Argentina, Austria, and Chile challenged her to discern a lexicon of silence, noise, defiance, the crashing of borders, the echoes of unruly lives, and unromantic more-than-human mutuality. In pursuing this, she was helpingly accompanied by wandering, staying and returning to eastern Slovakia, but also by exchanges at the universities of Huelva and Graz, and internships at the Institute of Translation and Interpretation at Karl-Franzens-Universität and at the IG24 Initiative. Similar to her (anthropological)  surroundings, in her research she tries to look at the end of the world but not to forget the end of the month. Anthropology has offered her new perspectives to look at maps without fixed points. After two years of her MA, the FHS UK has encouraged her to travel to Chile to explore the imperfect utopia of (more-than-human) squatters in the ruins of a "failed" revolution. She is delighted to be part of the team of ResisTerra. 

Luis Felipe R. Murillo hails from the South of Brazil, where the anticorporate globalization movement found its meeting point in the late 1999s to inaugurate a new technopolitics (which he credits to his cultivation as an anthropologist of computing). In his research work, Luis Felipe has been dedicated to the question of the "common" in its social, political, technical, and ecological dimensions. He now serves as assistant professor at University of Notre Dame in the Anthropology department, where he also serves as principal instigator for the Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) project---focused on the examination and sustainable support for building common tools and infrastrutures for collaborative socio-environmental studies. He has published a book Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (2025) in Stanford University Press.

When Marek Bock (he/him) returned to his home country with his diploma in product design after more than ten years of attending high school and university in Germany, he was fairly certain about two things: He didn't really feel like designing chairs, but he was nevertheless grateful to his design studies for at least making him aware of the issue of humans and their interactions with the environment. In Prague, he began to feel the need to deepen his education in the field of environmental protection and to combine it with his interest in design, hoping to find something meaningful in this combination, something that he would be able to explore for the rest of his life. This led him to the Master's program Social and Cultural Ecology at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, where he became particularly interested in environmental anthropology. The ethnographic approach, the creativity associated with it and the overall greater freedom in the approach to writing reminded him in many ways the reality of working on a design project. During his studies, he had the opportunity to participate in an international research project dealing with the interaction between humans and wildlife in the Beskydy Mountains. The project combined ecological and social science approaches and he was able to experience the reality of working with colleagues from the natural sciences. In the field, he has been observing assemblages forming around fences in the landscape; unraveling the interactions of living/non-living and human/non-human entities taking place at the intersection of simplifying design and environmental volatility, themes he plans to unravel within the Resisterra project. 

Mateusz Laszczkowski is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He received his doctorate from Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, in 2012. His doctoral project, carried out through a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, explored how sociopolitical and demographic change intersected with transformations to urban space and the built environment in Astana, the post-Soviet capital of Kazakhstan. That work led to the publication of Mateusz's first monograph, City of the Future': Built Space, Modernity, and Urban Change in Astana (Berghahn Books, 2016). His research interest in the mutually constitutive relations between politics and the material environment (including infrastructure) dates at least since then. With Mateusz's subsequent project, however, his work has taken a more activist inclination. In 2013 he received a postdoctoral research grant from the National Science Centre in Poland and was appointed as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw - the city he's originally from. His main work since then has focused on the No TAV movement that struggles against a high-speed rail project in Valsusa, in the Italian Alps. Several articles drawn from this research have been published in leading anthropological journals, such as Anthropological Theory and Ethnos, and the completion of a book manuscript is pending. Much of this work is driven by Mateusz's engagement with so-called neo-Spinozist 'affect theory', and in the meantime Mateusz co-edited a special issue of the journal Social Analysis (2015) dedicated to exploring the purchase of the notion of affect for the anthropology of the state. This was subsequently turned into the edited volume, Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions (Berghahn Books, 2017). In 2018, Mateusz spent a year as a visiting professor in political anthropology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His most recent work, while maintaining the foci on space, infrastructure, and political activism, has been evolving towards multi-species perspectives. This allows Mateusz to combine his academic interests with his other personae as an environmental activist and a person who enjoys scrambling through all sorts of scrubs and wallowing through marshes in pursuit of a bird or a bug of any kind to photograph, or just to admire. His work within ResisTerra thus focuses on activists trying to collaborate with beavers in struggles against the onslaught of the climate catastrophe. 

Michael Polák holds a PhD in Modern Social History from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. His research focuses on social history of the 19th and 20th centuries, with special attention to various social movements. In addition to several scholarly studies on the student movement in the 1950s and 1960s in Czech and foreign periodicals such as the Journal of Modern European History, Czech Journal of Contemporary History or Contradictions, he is the co-author of the books Sympathy for fascism among youth in late socialism, in: DIY Culture: Economical and political dimensions of Czech Subculture Practice of Late State Socialism and Post-Socialism (2017, in Czech), in which he examined neo-Nazism in the period of late-socialism and We Expect Nothing from Reforms. Chapters on Czech Anarchism (2023, in Czech), where he examined anarcho-syndicalist miners. His current research focuses on the environmental aspects of more-than-class conflict between miners and coal miners in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has been involved in anti-fascist, feminist and environmental movements throughout his adult life, and is currently a community organiser with the Tenants Initiative. He believes in the power of people advocating for their interests through unions and movements, but if he let his heart guide him, he would be a community tree organiser. 

Petra Nováková stumbled into environmental anthropology somewhat by accident. After several years of traveling and briefly studying photography in Brno and multimedia in Denmark, but perhaps it was a year working in a hotel restaurant in the north of England, where she learned first-hand what socio-economic and cultural capital, global neoliberalism or xenophobia meant —though she didn’t fully grasp the terms back then. Initially drawn to political philosophy, she soon realized her imagination needed decolonizing and that she had to let go of the false dichotomy between humans and nature. Political ecology felt like a natural fit for a former "hero of capitalist labor." In her bachelor’s thesis, Petra explored radical imagination and degrowth conceptualizations of freedom in the context of the climate crisis. Now, she's working on her thesis about more-than-human aspects of shaping "agricultural landscapes" for humans. 

Participating in promising academic mobilities and internships, studying anthropology at Uppsala University, working in the press, being a curator in a cultural institution as well as making pasta in a pasta factory or raiding gallery openings did not meet the neoliberal expectations that Robert Repka (he/his) believed in at the time. Hence, he decided to give up all career and academic ambitions and set out to find a sense of home-ness in mountaineering in the Tatra Mountains. However, owing to the previous encounters, he couldn't unsee social injustice, exploitation, capitalist development, patriarchy and speciesism in the landscape he fell in love with. Escaping deeper into the mountains and exposing himself to vertical walls and sharp ridges, he only found the destructive tentacles of capital changing the environment irreversibly. The climatic anxiety of disappearing snow, endangered species and rising temperatures mingled with never-felt sensations of joy, contentment and kinship with other-than-human beings. Fortunately, the anthropology of more-than-human resistance provided him with a framework to intertwine his long-sought identity with the never-ending angst from the evils of the nature-culture divide. Even though the pragmatic end goal of his participation in ResisTerra is a PhD degree, what he truly seeks is metamorphosing into a mountain goat. 

Sára Hájková (she/her) is a bit of a biologist, a bit of an ethnographer, quite an activist, but mainly a person who is always asking how the worlds around her work and what she can do to make them more just for all beings. After getting her bachelor degree in biology she started to study social and cultural ecology, where, among other things, she discovered the magic of (environmental) anthropology. Her activism concentrates mainly on the social-climate, and queer movements. She comes from Ostrava and likes to be vocal about it. She regularly returns to the Moravian-Silesian region - not only for family, friends, activism, but recently mainly for research on the planning of a gigafactory in Dolní Lutyně. Here, she explores how more-than-human entities enter into the conflict over the planned construction, and what forms of multispecies justice might look like. As part of the Resisterra team, she also delves into the ins and outs of the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of a large research institution: in other words, she deals with the administrative issues related to the implementation of the project. 

Stine Krøijer is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work addresses questions of climate change and trees, activism, agro-industry and multispecies relationships in Northern Europe and Latin America. She is the author of Figurations of the Future: Forms and Temporality of Left Radical Politics (Berghahn, 2015).