Amelia Fiske, Ph.D.

Academic Career and Research Areas

Amelia Fiske is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She is a cultural anthropologist and has been working in an interdisciplinary bioethical environment since 2017. Her work is at the intersection of cultural anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, social medicine and bioethics, and environmental and humanities studies. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), held a postdoctoral position at Kiel University and conducted extensive field research in Ecuador before coming to TUM.

Dr. Fiske has over a decade of experience conducting interdisciplinary qualitative and ethnographic research in two key areas: 1) Anthropological and critical social science approaches to bioethics, artificial intelligence, and digital and sociotechnical shifts in knowledge production; 2) Ethnographic attention to issues of social-ecological justice, experiences of toxicity in the context of extraction, participatory research methods, and graphic arts.
Methodologically, she is an expert in qualitative research methods based on anthropological theories and the use of graphics to bring social science research closer to lay people. She has extensive experience in multinational contexts, including a research study on solidarity in the pandemic in nine European and twelve Latin American countries.
Her current research includes leading PARTIALJUSTICE, a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant investigating the uses of participatory algorithmic justice through ethnography and graphics. Her work is published in leading social and health science journals and graphics magazines.

Awards

• 2025 Margaret Mead Award for Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia. Awarded by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association.
• 2025 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award for Toxic: A Tour of the Ecuadorian Amazon as the best Nonfiction graphic novel. Awarded by the Association of American Publishers.
• 2024 ERC Starting Grant, PARTIALJUSTICE.
• 2016 Manning Dissertation Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Anthropology Faculty award for the outstanding dissertation of 2016.
• 2016 Honigmann Graduate Prize in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Anthropology Faculty award for exceptional achievements in sociocultural anthropology.