Contact

goldstein@cornell.edu

Jenny is a political ecologist and human geographer who studies how data infrastructures, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence mediate nature-society relations. Her current research investigates the role of seaweed in shaping the future of green industrial materials within the global bioeconomy. This work explores how seaweed-based innovations are reconfiguring markets, knowledge networks, and coastal governance systems, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of biotechnology, resource access, and geopolitical power dynamics. Through qualitative, multi-sited ethnographic research in Norway, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the US, she examines how different understandings of innovation shape the development of bio-based, green material industries.

Building on her work on environmental data infrastructures, Jenny is also interested in how artificial intelligence’s' material requirements transform environments and politics across places and scales. Her past research in Indonesia's peatlands examined how technologies like carbon accounting and satellite monitoring shape forest conservation and climate change mitigation efforts. Across these projects, Jenny's research asks critical questions about the role of technology in socio-environmental change.

Currently, Jenny is an assistant professor in the department of global development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, an Atkinson Center for Sustainability faculty fellow, and a core faculty member of Cornell's Southeast Asian Studies Program. She is also the Director of Cornell’s Center for Social Sciences Qualitative and Interpretive Research Institute (QuIRI). From 2022-24 she served as elected Chair of the Cultural and Political Ecology specialty group of the American Association of Geographers. She was an Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future postdoctoral associate at Cornell, based in the Science & Technology Studies department, from 2016-17. Jenny received a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016, a M.A. in Geography from UCLA in 2009, and a B.A. in Architectural History & Theory from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2005.