about

Madhuri Karak (she/her) is an independent researcher working at the intersections of climate, technology, and culture.

She has supported earth defenders, small-scale fishers and farmers, open data advocates and environmental practitioners to secure and manage the commons. Her research and writing outputs span landscape analysis, podcasts, narrative longform, toolkits, and strategic community engagement.

‘Collective organizing’ challenges are of particular interest to Madhuri: How are earth defenders mobilizing data initiatives to push for better regulations and end systemic harms? How did Indigenous youth in eastern India resist resource extraction? How can we better represent multi-sensory ways of knowing and experiencing land and forest in environmental data?

Her current project Beyond Carbon: Using Multi-sensory Datasets for Climate Action counters carbon-centered forest data infrastructures with experiments in eco-acoustic, oral, and text formats that foreground community-owned knowledges of landscapes against the dominant architecture of remote sensing data. Founded in December 2023, Beyond Carbon is a translocal initiative supported by the Catalyst Fund (Green Screen Coalition) and the SEEKCommons (Socio-Environmental Knowledge) Network, National Science Foundation. Other members of the initiative are Cindy Julianty and Michelle Cheripka.

Madhuri has consulted for Amnesty International, the Open Environmental Data Project, European Digital Rights (EDRi), and The Engine Room. She participated in the Digital Freedom Fund and EDRi’s ‘Decolonizing the Digital Rights Field in Europe’ process in 2023 and attended the Digital Liberation Retreat, ‘Europe’s first space for cross-movement connection and exchanges around digital in/justices’, convened by Weaving Liberation in 2024. Her partners in the environment and climate space include Rare, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Land & Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute.

Madhuri was a Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow (2019-2021) and holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work on Indigenous data sovereignty, climate justice, and technology has appeared in It’s Freezing in L.A., fiftytwo, the Container Magazine, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Behavioral Scientist, Public Books, and Slate.

She currently lives between Ankara, Türkiye and Kolkata, India.