Megan Wiessner Collaboration BIo

Meg Wiessner (she, hers)
Media, Culture, and Communication @ New York University
I’m a PhD candidate at New York University in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, where I study media technologies, ecology, and the built environment. My dissertation project looks at the rise of mass timber architecture in recent decades, the role of digital media tools across the timber supply chain, and the investments of the tech and construction industries into systems for low-carbon construction. I’m interested in how wood’s materiality is mediated and operationalized across complex logistical networks in order to emerge as a sustainable alternative to concrete. I also consider how mass timber fits into evolving narratives and metaphors about the environment, and how the industries surrounding it understand and grapple with their place in ecologies and histories of global extraction. I’m currently conducting fieldwork for this project in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.

My broad areas of interest include environmental media studies, infrastructural and logistical media systems, race and the environment, feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies, philosophy of technology, and architectural theory. My previous degrees are in geography and history, and in between all of that I’ve worked in the arts, outdoor ed, and local government. I’m also an organizer and former steward with GSOC-UAW 2110, the union of graduate employees at NYU. I would especially love to connect with people working on forestry, computation and ecology, or the AEC industry and anyone interested in creative research outputs.