Aida Arosoaie

Aida Arosoaie is a PhD Candidate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She uses multi-sited mixed methodology—namely, archival research, oral history, ethnography, and collaboration—to examine the interplay between technoscience, resource extraction, racial capitalism, and postcolonial agendas of justice across South and Southeast Asia. By exploring how the interrelations between natural rubber cultivation, the transformation of forestry, and the global consolidation of synthetic rubber production over the past century have played out in Malaysia and beyond, her research analyzes the ecological formations and geopolitical frictions produced through the interactions of competing modes of resource extraction. Aida’s doctoral research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation, as well as various research centers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the recipient of the 2025 Roy Rappaport Prize from the Anthropology & Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association and the 2025-2026 Genevieve Gorst Herfurth Award for Outstanding Research in the Social Sciences offered by the Sciences Divisional Committee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent work has been published in Environmental Humanities and Science & Education.