Spencer is currently working as a Postdoctoral Lecturer and Researcher in the Environmental Humanities at LMU-Munich’s Rachel Carson Center and previously he completed his Ph.D. in the Rhetoric department at UC-Berkeley, with designated emphases in Science and Technology Studies and Critical Theory. As a researcher, he is broadly interested in how science, labor, and infrastructure come together in the formation of planetary knowledges and in how working life is experienced in the context of environmental extremity and volatility.

Spencer’s current primary research project examines the working life of Antarctic stations, through which he has sought to attend critically to the way global and planetary knowledge is made in situ. Specifically, he has looked at the laboring activities and infrastructures subtending climate and environmental knowledge projects in the Antarctic and at the forms of environmental experience and knowledge coming out of Antarctica that exceed the systematic sciences. In this context, he has been particularly interested in the surprisingly prolific amateur creative writings, lay theorizing, artworks, and media produced by Antarctic workers (both scientific and operational) themselves, which offer untapped insights into the everyday workplace realities of extreme environments. Bringing these materials together, he is currently working on a book manuscript that will offer the first extended treatment of labor and workplace relations in Antarctica in the postwar era of long-term, institutionally sponsored research stations.

Outside of this work, he has a long-standing research interest in the interplay of speculative fiction and environmental futures and he has published/am in the process of publishing several standalone papers concerning speculative urban ecologies in scifi and utopian fiction.