Katy Lewis Hood was a Research Assistant and Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Katy is an interdisciplinary researcher thinking with the environmental humanities, Black and Indigenous studies, anti-colonial, feminist, and queer methodologies, and poetry/poetics. Their recently completed PhD thesis, undertaken in English and Geography at Queen Mary University of London, offers an interdisciplinary approach to Black and Indigenous poetic and spatial practices that respond to watery environments transformed by colonialism, slavery, and extractive capitalism in Turtle Island/North America, the Caribbean and Pacific islands, and configure forms of socio-ecological relating otherwise.

Katy’s research-led, often collaborative poetic practice seeks to develop experimental methods for sensing material and socio-ecological infrastructures and uneven geographies, focusing on questions of energy production and social reproduction, land dispossession and property, and dynamics of distance, remote/situatedness, and intimacy. In this context, Katy came to the Smart Forests project with an interest in how forests themselves become infrastructures with socio-political impacts across multiple scales.

Publications

Lewis Hood, Kate. “In the ‘fissures of infrastructure’: poetry and toxicity in ‘Garbage Arcadia.” Environmental Humanities 13, no.1 (2021): 136-58.

Lewis Hood, Kate, and Maria Sledmere. infra·structure. Carmarthenshire, UK: Broken Sleep Books, 2020.

Lewis Hood, Kate. “Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 22, no. 2 (2018): 181-96.