Jianni Tien is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she co-leads the ‘Embodying the Anthropocene’ research theme.
Jianni is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of the environmental humanities, feminist theory, and science and technology studies (STS), with a disciplinary background in media and communications. She is interested in the porous boundaries and material entanglements between the human and non-human; the environment, and larger systems of epistemological power.
Jianni researches a range of topics including the ontologies of hydrogeologic structures such as limestone sinkholes, human-microbial relations, and the materialities of pollution, toxicity and waste in the Anthropocene. She brings overlapping conceptual lenses to these topics, including non-representational theory, material feminisms, new materialism, hydrofeminism and geophilosophy. Methodologically, Jianni is interested in experimental feminist forms of knowledge-creation, including bodily methodologies and practice-led research.
She is currently writing a book on scuba diving as a bodily method of engagement with cenotes (naturally occurring subterranean reservoirs of water) – and how such experimental approaches to the “hydro” and the “geo” may allow for more just responses to the Anthropocene.