Fred Wojnarowski is an anthropologist whose work straddles environmental, economic and historical anthropology, and has so far been principally focused on Jordan and the wider Mashriq, with growing comparative work on Western Europe and the United Kingdom. Wojnarowski's current work brings together ethnography, archival research, discourse analysis, political economy and policy critique to explore how communities, activists, state actors and technical experts understand and contest water, land, infrastructure and socio-ecological change.

Across doctoral and postdoctoral research projects, Wojnarowski has worked on various themes, including rural protest and political activism, tribes and non-state politics, colonial afterlives, socio-political categorization, changing foodways, political ecology and, most recently, water scarcity and environmental activism. These cohere around a central interest in theorizing, interrogating and historicizing changing regimes of value: how different actors produce, dispute and transform ideas of worth, obligation, justice, authority and the common good. His current book project, Bled Dry, develops this approach through an analysis of water scarcity, moral economy and environmental politics in Jordan as it faces putative crises of water scarcity and socio-ecological ruin. He is also developing comparative research on water justice in the United Kingdom, focusing on river politics, the financialization of networked utilities and efforts to reimagine water as a commons. His postdoctoral project examined how water scarcity in Jordan — both as discourse and as unevenly experienced reality — was transforming political life and collective imaginaries of the future and of justice. This built on his doctoral fieldwork where poor rural protestors linked their critiques of corruption and the abandonment of some rural and tribal districts to the distribution of water and environmental harm. Based on 13 months of fieldwork in Madaba, Jordan, this doctoral work examined rural and tribal protest movements after 2011, situating them within longer histories of state formation, colonial transformation, nationalism and political economy, and is the subject of his forthcoming book, History and Protest in Jordan’s Bedouin Villages.

Before joining The American University in Cairo in 2026, Wojnarowski held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship and guest lectureship at the London School of Economics, where he contributed to teaching on environmental anthropology, politics and a critical introduction to the anthropology of the Middle East. He received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2021, where he also taught undergraduate anthropology and was a postdoctoral affiliate. Before academia, Wojnarowski worked with increasing frustration in policy, development and political communications in various governmental and international bodies, and has also had two brief and eye-opening stints teaching in schools in the United Kingdom, experiences that continue to inform his critical engagement with institutions, expertise and governance.