Meryl Shriver-Rice, PhD

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Research Interests:

Ethnobiology; Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR); anthropological approaches to environmental restoration; Decolonial re-storying; Historical ecology; Indigenous futures; Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK); Coastal heritage at risk from climate change; Applied ethics in interdisciplinary environmental social science methods.

Biography

Meryl Shriver-Rice Ph.D., R.P.A. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Ecology and Director of Research for the Institute for American Indian Studies Museum. She is an environmental anthropologist and archaeologist who focuses on ethnobiology, decolonial public anthropology, environmental justice, and community-based participatory research. Her research focuses on how diverse human-environment interactions reveal the ways that people understand, value, and relate to other species and their surrounding environments. In particular, her research has examined how sociocultural concepts of belonging and heritage are historically grounded and entangled with ecological knowledge, inter-generational experiences with landscape, and environmental management strategies.

Her current book Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics, Community-based Work, and Re-Storying the Dead (with anthropologist Sarah Hiepler, under contract Wiley Blackwell) examines decolonial approaches to digital interventions within wildlife conservation efforts, community-based outreach, environmental communication, museum and park archival strategies and interpretation, and public exhibition of the dead. Before coming to Rutgers, she designed and taught for the interdisciplinary master’s program Environment, Culture, and Media at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy at the University of Miami.

Dr. Shriver-Rice has served as a grant reviewer for the Cultural and Community Resilience panel (CCR) for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); served on the faculty working group that founded the Native American and Global Indigenous Studies (NAGIS) program at UMiami; is a member of Allying for Diversity and Inclusion in Ethnobiology (ADIE) and the North American Heritage at Risk project (NAHAR); and has served as an interdisciplinary social scientist on the grant board of the Independent Research Fund Denmark for ‘Green Research’ (DFF).

She is co-founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Media and co-director (with Gregory Warden) of the Potentino Exploration Project which combines community-based research on historical ecology and climate impacts with archaeological excavation as part of an interdisciplinary regional landscape study of the Seggiano basin in Tuscany. She also serves on the Miami-Dade Vulnerability Assessment Working Group that is charged with ranking archaeological sites by risk of climate impacts.

Current Research Projects

Endangered inter-generational knowledge and practice for Black Seminole descendants of Andros island (PI, Endangered Material Knowledge Program)

Visual Interventions and the Climate Crisis: Researching Environmental Justice through Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Climate Impacts in Seggiano (co-PI with Hunter Vaughan, University of Cambridge)

Untold Stories at Risk: Coastal Heritage, Site Risk Assessment, and Educational Outreach (PI, Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge, University of Miami), a decolonial public anthropology and climate resilience project that is the foundation of the Coastal Heritage at Risk Taskforce (CHART).

Recent Publications

Shriver-Rice, M., Hiepler, S. Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics, Community-based Work, and Re-Storying the Dead Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming 2025.

Reamer, M., MacDonald, C., Wester, J., Fielding, R., Shriver-Rice, M. “A ‘war’ over lobster and whales: The issue-attention cycle, discourse, and political ecology of right whale science and conservation in US news media.” Frontiers in Science and Environmental Communication; forthcoming.

De La Torre, N., Salas Esteban, M.F., Shriver-Rice, M. ‘A decolonial strategy for digitisation: ethnographic dialogues on data sharing Latin American Indigenous heritage at museum collections,’ Current Anthropology; under review.

Fernandez, J., Shriver-Rice, M., Johns, L., Riopelle, C.  “Emotional and Cognitive Modes of Engagement: An Examination of South Floridians’ Responses to Short-Form Videos on Sea Level Rise,” Applied Environmental Education & Communication; under review.

Shriver-Rice, M., Stoddart, S., Mercuri A.M., Florenzano, Trentacoste, A.; ‘Environmental Approaches to Etruscan Studies: Re-Visiting Negri 1927 Almost One Hundred Years Later in Etruscan Archaeology: Technologies and Methods edited by Maurizio Forté. Oxford University Press; 2025.

Reamer, M.B., Vaughan, H., Shriver-Rice, M. “Last of the North American Right Whales: Policies, Conservation efforts, and Stakeholders depicted in Entangled and Last of the Right Whales,” Journal of International Wildlife & Policy; 2024.

Reamer, M.B., Macdonald, C., Wester, J., Shriver-Rice, M. “Whales for Sale: A content analysis of American whale watching operators’ websites,” Tourism in Marine Environments, 18. 2023.

Shriver-Rice, M, Hiepler, S. ‘The Ethics of Digitizing Death and Engagement with Museum Publics,’ in Digital Futures in the Making: Imaginaries, Re-mediation, Materialities, and Politics edited by Gertraud Koch and Samantha Lutz, 2023.

Vaughan, Bojczuk, Starosielski, Shriver-Rice. “Renewable Energy Feasibility Study, Ireland,” Sustainable Subsea Networks. 2022.

Shriver-Rice, M., Schmidt, F. ‘Environmental and Archaeobotanical Studies in Etruscan Archaeology: An Epistemological Overview and Future Considerations of Human-Plant Relationships,’ Etruscan and Italic Studies, Taylor & Francis, 2022.

Shriver-Rice, M., Schneider, J., Pardo, C. ‘The Critical Role of Environmental Archaeology in Contemporary Conservation Efforts,’ World Archaeology, Taylor & Francis, 2022.

Shriver-Rice, M.; Hernandez, J.; Riopelle, C.; Vaughan, H.; Johns, L. ‘Young Adults’ Reactions and Engagement with Short-Form Videos on Sea Level Rise.’ Environmental Communication, 2021.

Shriver-Rice, M., A. Lund, J. Madsen. ‘JORDNÆR CREATIVE: A Danish case study of green media and sustainable production,’ In A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value edited Mette Hjort and Ted Nannicelli. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2021.

Shriver-Rice, Vaughan, H. “Digital Heritage and the Anthropocene: Media Use in Site-Specific Archaeological Installations in Lazio, Italy,” Journal of Italianist Studies: Special Issue on Ecomedia; Volume 40:2. 2020.

Shriver-Rice, M., Vaughan, H. “What is Environmental Media?” Journal of Environmental Media, Vol. 1.1. December 2019.

Skubel, R., Shriver-Rice, M., and Maranto, G. “Introducing Relational Values as a Tool for Shark Conservation, Science, and Management,” Frontiers in Marine Science, Volume 6; 2018.

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