Serena Stein is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Princeton University, and has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil and southern Africa since 2015 on questions of agribusiness, environmental change, and transnational linkages in rural development and resource extractivism . Her dissertation, “Kindred Frontiers: South-South Experiments in Africa’s Soy Boom,” examines the rise and fall of Brazil’s South-South Cooperation in Mozambique, through the experiences of smallholder farmers adopting soybean cultivation, living amid newly-established foreign plantations, and reimagining Indigenous and traditional knowledge and relationships. Questions of autochthony and foreignization, as it intersects with ethnicity, gender, class, and conflict across northern Mozambique, figure prominently in her research. As a National Geographic Society Explorer, Serena has also been documenting agrarian transformation and deforestation in this savanna landscape on the sacred Mount Namuli (the point of origin for Makhuwa and Lomwé people) in visual and audio storytelling. As a Princeton Energy and Climate Scholar, Serena has also been accompanying Arctic native peoples’ efforts to launch agricultural and gardening activities as part of climate adaptation. This year, she is co-PI for a new collaborative and decolonial project spanning scholars and practitioners in Mozambique, India, and the United States on coastal agrarian change and mangrove ecologies. Her research has been supported by Wenner Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Hays, National Science Foundation, and Princeton University, among others.