Eva Kotašková is an environmental anthropologist, interested in more-than-human relations and mobilities. She conducted her doctoral research on the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic. Her ethnographic research examined how various constituents of the environment – such as glacier ice caves and remnants of coal mining – alongside everyday tourism practices, including tour guides’ storytelling and tourists’ engagement with the landscape, contribute to reconfiguring both the past and present of Svalbard’s environment. The ongoing transformation from a coal-mining industry to a tourism destination involves not only the decommissioning of mining infrastructure but also transforming human-environment relations leading to enactment of wilderness.

Currently, Eva is part of RAVE research project which investigates the complex entanglements between humans, nonhumans, and infrastructures in relation to road accidents in urban traffic in the Czech Republic and Austria. Her contribution to the project focuses on analysing how more-than-human relations co-create experiences of guilt in the aftermath of road accidents, as well as on the methodological implications of employing the go-along method.

Dividing her time between Brno and the Arctic, Eva is committed to blurring the boundaries between academic research and broader society. She is a co-founder and an active member of Svalbard Social Science Initiative, which promotes transdisciplinary research and facilitates communication with local communities in Svalbard. In Brno, she co-founded NERO kolektiv, a grassroots organization dedicated to developing innovative strategies to address ethnic-based segregation of children and youth. Through these initiatives, she seeks to integrate anthropological theory and practice, contributing to the co-creation of more collaborative and imaginative futures.

At FSS MU, she teaches courses on Environmental Anthropology, Material Culture, Anthropological Reading, and the Anthropology of Kiniship.