Kirsten Mundt, PhD

Kirsten Mundt, PhD, earned her doctoral degree in American Studies from UNM, her MA from St. John’s College in Eastern Classics, and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Dickinson College. She holds professional certificates in mediation (Federal Conciliation Services), strategic foresight (University of Houston) and International Program Evaluation (IPDET/University of Bern).

Kirsten dropped out of her first graduate program in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zimbabwe when she realized she didn’t want to study others before better understanding herself. Over the next 10 years, she worked in homeless shelters for teens in her home state of New York, studied bodywork and meditation, worked for community non-profits, and led gap year programs in South Asia and East Africa.

After completing a master’s degree at St. John’s College in Eastern Classics, she found that Socratic Dialogue was an inclusive pedagogical foundation for expanding beyond disciplinary boundaries. She taught English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, University of New Mexico, and the Life Healing Center, for many years before completing her PhD in American Studies in 2018.

Her dissertation research at the University of New Mexico focused on coloniality, or ways that Western philosophical traditions may restrict visions for a more livable future based on limited definitions of what it means to be a “self.” https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/amst_etds/82/ Theorizing senseur ethnography as method, her work tracks lived experiences that meander between worlds that don’t make sense, but find meaning through the felt sense as the body navigates social spaces constructed to limit expression. Her work has been published in the Arrow Journal for Wakeful Politics in two special issues; Healing Social and Ecological Rifts: https://arrow-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/HSER-Vol.-8.2-K.Mundt-Touch-as-Passage.pdf and Rest and Creativity: https://arrow-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Vol.-9.1-Rest-Creativity-6.1.2022-1.pdf.

She has presented her work at the Western States Political Science Association, Society for Applied Anthropology, Affect Theory conference, and other conferences exploring the intersection between literature and planetary futures. She was a Fellow with the Mind and Life Research Institute (2018, 2019), a Social Justice Fellow at the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education Conference (2017, 2018), and is currently a Nuclear Futures Fellow funded by Horizon 2045 and Ploughshares https://www.horizon2045.org/nuclear-futures-fellowship.

Currently, Kirsten is an applied cultural anthropologist and strategic partner for organizations and communities seeking people-centered and sustainable transformation. Through engaging the intersection between strategic foresight, social/behavioral sciences, contemplative practices, and the humanities, her work tackles gnarly problems such as data sovereignty in the age of AI, nuclear threat reduction, and widening social fragmentation. She is engaged in multiple collaborations with scientists and leaders in efforts to spark innovation, inform policy, and create thoughts we didn’t yet know we could think.

Kirsten is employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she leads strategic planning retreats and organizational design initiatives. She serves on the Advisory Board of Creative Santa Fe and is thrilled to support PhD students at Southwestern College. She lives in Santa Fe with a menagerie of scruffy animals and an incredible son named Skyler.