Dr. Megan Wiessner

Megan Wiessner is a media studies scholar who works on questions of digital technology, environment, and culture. Her research and teaching on these topics span several areas: the social and environmental impacts of digital media infrastructures; the role of emerging media technologies in shaping ecological governance; the intertwined cultures of tech and environmentalism; and, most fundamentally, the ways digital life remains rooted in peoples' relations with the earth.

Bringing these areas together, her current book project is a study of the rise of digitally fabricated timber architecture in Western North America. The project documents how digitalization in architecture and construction has influenced the way architectural sustainability is imagined and measured, traces how this has resulted in the unlikely reinvention of timber as a climate-friendly material, and explores what these informatic and logistical approaches to sustainability mean for forests, housing, and workers.

Wiessner is also working on two new projects. The first is a study of the U.S. Forest Service’s controversial use of linear programming for environmental planning during the 1980s, and this episode’s contribution to a wider delegitimization of state planning in the United States. The second is a rethinking of automation as an environmental phenomenon, revisiting debates about technology and labor through a wider materialist lens.

Prior to joining the University of Richmond, Wiessner was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Virginia’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, an affiliate of Sloane Lab, and a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She completed her Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and holds additional degrees in history and geography.