A woman with long brown hair and glasses, wearing a dark jacket, stands outdoors against a blurred green background, smiling softly at the camera.

Shana Hirsch, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, School of Marine & Environmental Affairs

Research areas

Shana Hirsch is a qualitative social scientist with a background in natural resource politics, policy, and management. Her work focuses on emerging technologies and their impact on individuals, communities, and policies related to sustainability and equity. She is especially motivated to understand these dynamics to ensure adaptation and resilience to climate change across all aspects of society. Her main areas of research have been on marine energy, including wave and tidal energy, offshore wind, and emerging environmental monitoring and restoration technologies and techniques. Shana enjoys using creative, participatory, and community-engaged methods to shape questions, gather data, and understand how people relate to the environment through science and technology. 

Selected publications

Hirsch, S. L. (2020). Anticipating Future Environments: Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Cisneros-Montemayor, A. M., Hirsch, S. L., Dillon, T., González-Espinosa, P. C., Moreno-Báez, M., Tighsazzedeh, M. N., Ota, Y. (2026). Ocean renewable energy for equitable energy access in a Blue Economy. Scientific Reports.

Hirsch, S., Ip, Y.C.A., Brandão-Dias, P.F.P., Allan, E. A., Kelly, R. (2026). Understanding practical barriers to global adoption of environmental DNA (eDNA) methods tools, and standards. BMC Research Notes.

Tighsazzadeh, M. H., Doyon, A., Hirsch, S. L. Cisneros-Montemayor, A. M. (2024). The evolution of equity in offshore renewable energy: a systematic literature review. Ocean and Coastal Management. 263.

Hirsch, S., Acharya-Patel, N., Amamoo, P. A., Borrero-Pérez, G. H., Cahyani, N. K. D., Ginigini, J. G. M., Hurley, K. K. C., Lopes-Lima, M., Lopez, M. L., Mapholi, N., Ouattara, K. N., Pazmiño, D. A., Rii, Y., Thompson, F., von der Heyden, S., Watsa, M., Yepes-Narvaez, V., Allan, E., Kelly, R. (2024). Centering accessibility, increasing capacity, and fostering innovation in the development of international eDNA standards. Metabarcoding & Metagenomics. DOI: 10.3897/mbg.8.126058

Hirsch, S. and Ribes, D. (2021). Innovation and legacy in energy knowledge infrastructures. Energy Research & Social Science. 80.  

Hirsch, S. (2020). Governing technological zones, making national renewable energy futures. Futures. 124. Special issue: linking strategy, long term perspectives and policy domains in governance.

Hirsch, S. and Drakopulos. (2020). Making global problems local: understanding large-scale environmental issues using ethnographic methods. Science, Technology, & Human Values. 45:5, pp. 963-973

Hirsch, S. (2020). Anticipatory practices: shifting baselines and environmental imaginaries of ecological restoration in the Columbia River Basin. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 3:1, pp. 40-57. Special Issue: Shifting Baselines and Environmental Management.