Staff profile

PhD, Geography, University of Minnesota, 2011

MA, Geography, University of Minnesota, 2007

BA, Geography and Environmental Studies, Clark University, 2001

Elizabeth Johnson studies how new ties between the biosciences and technological innovation are changing how we understand life in the context of environmental precarity. She writes on developing fields like biomimicry, biosensing, and biotechnology and their influence on how we inhabit our environment. She is currently researching the interface between marine science and policy with a focus on tensions between marine conservation and the emerging Blue Economy. The project titled, "Circulatory Entanglements," examines how marine organisms and the materials extracted from them pass through, across, and into the different ecological and epistemological worlds to figure in the production of healthy publics, ecological futures, and promissory economies.

She is also working to finish a book manuscript, Life’s Work: the Politics of Biological Productivity. The manuscript draws on interviews and ethnographic material to show how the biosciences are reshaping life and value by reimagining nonhuman bodies and behaviors as a resource for innovation. 

Her work broadly falls into the following themes and topics:

*Geographies and epistemologies of life, particularly surrounding how the emerging bioeconomy and green innovation valorize biological forms and materials.

*Critical ocean studies at the intersection of political ecology, the environmental humanities, and human-animal relations.

*Discourses and policies of securitization, as they relate to geopolitics and military science as well as ecological conservation.

• Economy & Culture
• Geographies of Life

Chapter in book

• Johnson, Elizabeth R. & Braverman, Irus (2020). Blue Legalities: Untangling Ocean Laws in the Anthropocene. In Blue Legalities: The Life and Law of the Sea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R. (2019). The Hydra and Leviathan: Unmanned Maritime Vehicles and the Militarized Seaspace. In Blue Legalities: The Life and Law of the Sea. Braverman, Irus & Johnson, Elizabeth R. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Edited book

• Braverman, Irus & Johnson, Elizabeth R. (2020). Blue Legalities: The Life and Law of the Sea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Journal Article

• Lehman, Jessica S. & Johnson, Elizabeth (2022). Environmental Geography and the Inheritance of Western Technoscience. Progress in Environmental Geography 1(1-4): 23-32.
• Lehman, J., Steinberg, P. & Johnson, E.R. (2021). Turbulent waters in three parts. Theory and Event 24(1): 192-219.
• Johnson, Elizabeth (2020). Biomimetic Geopolitics: The Earth, Inside Out. Techniques & Culture Supplements 73: 13832.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R, Kindervater, Garnet, Todd, Zoe, Yusoff, Kathryn, Woodward, Keith & Povinelli, Elizabeth A (2019). Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37(8): 1319-1342.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R. (2017). At the Limits of Species Being: Sensing the Anthropocene. South Atlantic Quarterly 116(2): 275-292.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R. (2016). Reconsidering Mimesis: Freedom and Acquiescence in the Anthropocene. South Atlantic Quarterly 115(2): 267-289.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R. (2015). Of Lobsters, Laboratories, and War: Animal Studies and the Temporality of More-Than-Human Encounters. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(2): 296-313.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R. & Goldstein, Jesse (2015). Biomimetic Futures: Life, Death, and the Enclosure of a More-Than-Human Intellect. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 387-396.
• Goldstein, Jesse & Johnson, Elizabeth (2015). Biomimicry: New Natures, New Enclosures. Theory, Culture & Society 32(1): 61-81.
• Meyerhoff, Eli, Johnson, Elizabeth & Braun, Bruce (2011). Time and the University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 10(3): 483-507.
• Johnson, Elizabeth R. (2010). Reinventing biological life, reinventing 'the human'. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 10(2): 177-193.