Sasha Tycko

Sasha Tycko is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. Her research explores how the relationship between humanity and nature is imagined and transformed in the course of political struggle. This inquiry is animated by the paradox of being human as described by Marx: that human beings makehistory but under conditions not of their choosing.

Sasha’s current book project, The Atlanta Forest: Structure and Anti-Structure in the Stop Cop City Movement, follows the explosive “Stop Cop City” movement, when self-described “forest defenders” occupied one of the largest urban forests in the United States in an attempt to stop the development of a privately funded police training center outside Atlanta. Sasha carried out two years of fieldwork in the forest occupation, exploring how culturally specific ideas about the American wilderness and the country’s past shaped the political and social practices of activists.  

Sasha maintains a practice-based anthropology that pursues ethnographic filmmaking and photography as distinct ways of seeing, with critical attention to the historical development of scholarly conventions in anthropology. She frequently collaborates with activists and others. In the course of her most recent research, she made two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest (2023, 40 min.) and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work (co-produced with Marion Lary, 2023, 12 min.). They have been screened widely. She had a solo photography exhibition, Ways of the Atlanta Forest, at Institute 193. Her narrative essay on the Stop Cop City movement, “Not One Tree,” (co-authored with Grace Glass, n+1, 2023) was awarded the Krause Essay Prize from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. 

Sasha teaches courses in ethnographic cinema, environmental anthropology, political ecology, political anthropology, and social movements.