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.

Chapter in book

• Johnson, E. R. (2020). The Hydra and Leviathan: Unmanned Maritime Vehicles and the Militarized Seaspace. In I. Braverman, & E. R. Johnson (Eds.), Blue legalities : the life and law of the sea. Duke University Press
• Johnson, E. R., & Braverman, I. (2020). Blue Legalities: Untangling Ocean Laws in the Anthropocene. In Blue legalities: the life and law of the sea. Duke University Press

Edited book

• Braverman, I., & Johnson, E. R. (Eds.). (2020). Blue Legalities: The Life and Law of the Sea. Duke University Press

Journal Article

• Lehman, J. S., & Johnson, E. (2022). Environmental Geography and the Inheritance of Western Technoscience. Progress in Environmental Geography, 1(1-4), 23-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/27539687221124613
• Lehman, J., Steinberg, P., & Johnson, E. (2021). Turbulent waters in three parts. Theory and Event, 24(1), 192-219
• Johnson, E. (2020). Biomimetic Geopolitics: The Earth, Inside Out. Techniques & culture, 73, Article 13832
• Johnson, E. R., Kindervater, G., Todd, Z., Yusoff, K., Woodward, K., & Povinelli, E. A. (2019). Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(8), 1319-1342. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419875148
• Johnson, E. R. (2017). At the Limits of Species Being: Sensing the Anthropocene. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(2), 275-292. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3829401
• Johnson, E. R. (2016). Reconsidering Mimesis: Freedom and Acquiescence in the Anthropocene. South Atlantic Quarterly, 115(2), 267-289. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3488409
• Johnson, E. 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. https://doi.org/10.1068/d23512
• Johnson, E. R., & Goldstein, J. (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. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.985625
• Goldstein, J., & Johnson, E. (2015). Biomimicry: New Natures, New Enclosures. Theory, Culture and Society, 32(1), 61-81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414551032
• Meyerhoff, E., Johnson, E., & Braun, B. (2011). Time and the University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 10(3), 483-507
• Johnson, E. R. (2010). Reinventing biological life, reinventing 'the human'. Ephemera, 10(2), 177-193