Research Interests
Land, Environmental justice, Resources, State formation, Sovereignty, Postcolonial urbanisms, Political ecology, Singapore, Southeast Asia
Biography
Vanessa Koh is an anthropologist whose ethnographic research focuses on the nexus between land reclamation, sovereignty, and climate change in Singapore. She studies what it means to make both land and environmental claims in an epoch marked by increasing precarity. Prior to joining Brown, she received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University's Department of Anthropology and School of the Environment in 2023 and was the 2023-2024 Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.
Selected publications
2025. “Growing Sustainable Capitalism: The Environmental Politics of Agri-Tech in Singapore.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. doi.org/10.1177/0308518X251323148
2022. “Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties.” With S. Yamada, L. Kanoi, A. Lim, M.R. Dove. Sustainability 14(5):3095. doi.org/10.3390/su14053095
2022. “‘What is infrastructure? What does it do?’: Anthropological Perspectives on the Workings of Infrastructure(s).” With L. Kanoi, A. Lim, S. Yamada, M.R. Dove. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability 2(1):012002. doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ac4429
Climate conversations came to life at IBES this semester as thought leaders, students, and changemakers gathered to exchange ideas, share stories, and shape real-world solutions.
This article, written by Voss Postdoc Vanessa Koh, examines the nexus of the emergence of the agri-tech ecosystem in Singapore and concerns over climate change.