Writing

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Accepted. “The Substitute and the Excuse: Growing Sustainability and Sugarcane in São Paulo, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology.

Undergoing revisions after first round of review. “Flexibility as Theory of Change: Turning Sugarcane into Sugar, Biofuels, and/or Futures in São Paulo, Brazil.” Anthropological Quarterly.  

Book Chapters

Ford, Mel and Katie Ulrich. 2021. “Questions, Experiments, and Movements of Ethnographies in the Making.” In Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, eds. Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Public-Facing

2023. “Click to Transform Sugarcane.” An experiment in sharing and visualizing some of my research through interactive mapping. It was developed through conversations with the Ethnography Studio and Infrastructures of Ethnography project. Explore the interactive map here: https://bit.ly/clicksugarcane.

Blog Posts

2021. Jessica Caporusso, Duygu Kasdogan, and Katie Ulrich. “Confronting Legacies of Toxic Goodness: Speculative Reflections from the 4S 2021 Annual Meeting.EnviroSociety, November 12.

2021. “A Sugarcane List.” Correspondences: A Forum for the Environment, 26 May.

2021. Okune, Angela and Katie Ulrich. “Building Collaborative Habits, Establishing Sustaining Relations: What is the Role of a Scholarly Society Today?Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, 23 March.

2021. Okune, Angela, Katie Ulrich, Kim Fortun, Duygu Kasdogan, Grant Otsuki, Maka Suarez, Wambui Wamunyu, and Amanda Windle. “Intermediary Artifacts: Exploring Collaborative Possibilities as Part of Ethnographic Research Design.” Teaching & Learning Anthropology Journal, 15 February.

2020. “The Work it Takes to Stop Working: Productivity in Labs and Sugarcane.” Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, 10 November.

2020. Extraction Syllabus: A CENHS Fellows Interdisciplinary Project. The CENHS Blog, 7 February.

2018. “Sugar Cane in Bolsonaro’s Brazil.Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, 13 November.

2018. Book Review: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, eds. Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt. The CENHS Blog, 17 January.

2018. Book Review: Matters of Care, by María Puig de la Bellacasa. The CENHS Blog, 2 April.

2017. “Can Sucro Futures Answer our Biotechnofix Dreams?Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, 12 December.

2017. “Some Chemical and More-Than-Human Transformations of Sugar/Energy.” EnviroSociety, 21 June.

Biology Papers

Lao J, Ulrich K, Johnson J, Newton B, Vashisht A, Wohlschlegel J, Krogan N, Toczyski D. 2018. “The Yeast DNA Damage Checkpoint Kinase Rad53 Targets the Exoribonuclease, Xrn1.Genes, Genomes, Genetics 8(12): 3931-3944.

Kim S, D’Acunto VF, Kokona B, Hofmann J, Cunningham NR, Bistline EM, Garcia FJ, Akhtar NM, Hoffman SH, Doshi SH, Ulrich KM, Jones NM, Bonini NM, Roberts CM, Link CD, Laue TM, Fairman R. 2017. “Sedimentation Velocity Analysis with Fluorescence Detection of Mutant Huntingtin Exon 1 Aggregation in Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans.” Biochemistry 56(35): 4676-4688.

Kokona B, May C, Cunningham N, Richmond L, Garcia F, Durante J, Ulrich K, Roberts C, Link C, Stafford W, Laue T, Fairman R. 2016. “Studying Polyglutamine Aggregation in Caenorhabditis elegans Using an Analytical Ultracentrifuge Equipped with Fluorescence Detection.” Protein Science 25(3): 605-17.

Loveless TB, Topacio BR, Vashisht AA, Galaang S, Ulrich KM, Young BD, Wohlschlegel JA, Toczyski DP. 2015. “DNA Damage Regulates Translation through ß-TRCP Targeting of CReP.” PLoS Genetics 11(6): 1-22.

Conference Papers

Please email me (kmu@rice.edu) for a copy of any of these presentations.

2022. “Carbon, Carbohydrates, and Carbo-Futures: Making Sugar into Oil through Sugarcane Science in Brazil.” Meeting for the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Cholula, Mexico, 7 – 10 December.

2022. “Wasting Sustainability: Sugarcane and Biomass-to-Energy Science in Brazil.” American Anthropological Association Meeting. Seattle, WA, 9 – 13 November.

2021. “‘Sugarcane isn’t waste, it’s a feedstock’: Waste as Extractive Technology and Biomass-to-Energy Science in Brazil.” American Anthropological Association Meeting. Baltimore, MD, 17 – 21 November.

2021. “Toxic Ash, Hopeful Leaves: Brazilian Sugarcane Histories and Biofuels Futures.” Meeting for the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Virtual, 6 – 9 October.

2021. “Tracing Residues of Sugarcane Histories, Mapping New and Enduring Extraction Practices.” Anthropology in Transit Conference. Virtual (University of California Irvine), 10 – 11 April.

2021. “Brazilian Sugarcane Extractability, and the New and Enduring Places of Sugar in Modern History.” EnviroLab Conference. Virtual (University of Pennsylvania), 18 – 20 March.

2021. “Examining Brazilian Sugarcane Extraction through Comedy Routines, Webinar Technical Issues, and a Stuffed Animal Yeast.” Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology, jointly sponsored with the Culture and Agriculture section. Virtual, 4 – 5 March.

2020. “Redesigning Growth: Sugarcane Biotechnology and Post-Petroleum Futures in São Paulo, Brazil.” Meeting for the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Virtual, 18 – 21 August.

2019. “Making Sugar into Oil: Sugarcane Science and Sugar-based Petrochemical Replacements in Brazil.” American Anthropological Association Meeting. Vancouver, BC, 20 – 24 November.

2018. “Replacing Petrochemical Infrastructures: Imaginaries of Sugarcane-Based Chemicals in Brazil.” American Anthropological Association Meeting. San Jose, CA, 14 – 18 November.

2017. “The End(s) of Science: Temporal Trajectories of Brazilian Biofuel Research.” Meeting for the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Boston, MA, 30 August – 2 September.

2017. “Recalcitrant Futurity: Biofuels, Sugar, and Molecular Energy Tangles in Brazil.” American Anthropological Association Meeting. Washington, DC, 29 November – 3 December.

2015. “Imitation Games in US and Brazilian Biofuels Research.” Faking It: Counterfeits, Copies, and Uncertain Truths in Science, Technology, and Medicine Conference. Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. University of California, Berkeley, CA, 10-11 April.