I am a post-field Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Before that, I got my Bachelor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. I am broadly interested in agriculture, corporations, ethics, governance, language, and the European Union. My research agenda, which is rooted directly in a critical dialogue between environmental anthropology, linguistic anthropology, organizational studies, and science and technology studies, explores the relationship between language, audit cultures, and food systems, with a particular emphasis on how these domains intersect with human experience.
In my dissertation research, I focus on the use of specific forms of accountability—the work of inspectors, spreadsheets, and mathematical models—in a dairy cooperative in Sardinia, Italy. Throughout the dissertation, I scale the concept of accountability to its context within Italian history and the ways that the European Union’s current politics reflect new challenges to democratic governance. My research, both in the field and at UC Irvine, has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (NSF DDRIG), and the Fulbright IIE.
My work has been published in Anthropology News, Language and Communication, Language in Society, and Narrative Inquiry.
Email me at gkohler [at] uci [dot] edu