The Anthropology and the Environment Committee of the RAI have put together a list of anthropologists who are interested in environmental issues.  This list is a resource for other anthropologists and for those outside anthropology looking for a particular expertise.

If you are interested in being included please reply to admin@therai.org.uk and include:

  • Name
  • Affiliation
  • Contact details
  • Statement of interest
  • Geographical/topical area of interest

Name: Dr Sophie Haines

Affiliation: University of Oxford (Institute for Science, Innovation and Society)

Contact details: sophie.haines@insis.ox.ac.uk

Statement of interest: My research focuses on environmental knowledge and decision-making in contexts of social and ecological change. I am interested in the interfaces of anthropology and science and technology studies, of natural and social sciences, and of research and policy-making processes. To date my research has explored perceptions of the environment, changing livelihoods, conservation practice, infrastructural development, and the use of scientific predictions for resource and hazard management. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork and interview-based studies in Belize, Kenya, and the UK.

Geographical/topical area of interest: Central America (Belize), Europe (UK), East Africa (Kenya) development & environment, infrastructure, weather & climate change, science & society

Name: Joy Hendry

Affiliation: Oxford Brookes (emerita) and Edinburgh (honorary)

Contact details: jhendry@brookes.ac.uk

Statement of interest: indigenous science

Geographical/topical area of interest: global!

Name: Andrea Höing

Affiliation: Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany

Contact details: Andrea Höing, Institut für Orient und Asienwissenschaften, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Bonner Talweg 57, 53113 Bonn, Germany. Email: ahoeing@uni-bonn.de

Statement of interest: I am currently conducting my PhD research on emic perspectives on forest and land fire issues of local communities in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. I am having a natural science background, but shifted my focus on social ecological issues.

Geographical/topical area of interest: Southeast Asia Networks behind trade of natural resources, climate change issues, living with natural disasters.

Name: Cymene Howe

Affiliation: Rice University, Department of Anthropology and the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences.

Contact details: cymene@rice.edu 415.203.4346

Statement of interest: The project I am currently developing concerns the social life of ice in the Arctic and, specifically, in the country of Iceland. Following my work on renewable energy transitions—which has analyzed the role of “mitigation” strategies in forestalling further anthropogenic harms to the earth’s aqua-, litho-, bio- and atmospheres, this project centers on “adaptations” to climate change. Ice has clearly become our climatological canary. It can be measured, its retreats photographed, its historic depths plumbed and its duration—or life span—calculated. And it is melting: nowhere faster, and faster than expected, in the Arctic region. Ice’s physical changes and the geohydrological implications associated with it are now featured regularly in the media, especially as displacements increase and permafrost withers. However, scant attention has been given to the social and cultural meaning of changing ice formations in the frozen places where it has dominated landscapes, shaped lives and conditioned accounts of land, weather and subjective experience. This project prioritizes the social and political significance of ice, the values associated with it, and the implications of its expiration; it is an inquiry into the social sentiments and consequences of melt and the metamorphosis of ice. In the simplest terms it is a study of cryohmuan relations.  
 
My second book Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (forthcoming 2017) is based on a collaborative research project (with Dominic Boyer) in Oaxaca, Mexico and focuses on the political and social contingencies of renewable energy development. Home to some of the best wind on the planet, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has been the locus for a booming wind energy industry. While wind park development across the Isthmus has been animated by state and corporate initiatives that purport to enhance regional economic development, generate a green profile for the Mexican state and suspend, to a degree, a quantity of carbon dioxide contamination, local resistance to projects has been significant and is deeply conditioned by histories of state abandonment and suspicions regarding transnational capital. Conflicts surrounding renewable energy transitions are, on the one hand, deeply political economic in nature, concerning dispossession and persistent inequalities. But they are also summarily ethical projects that hold out a promise for a greater global good, while often demanding localized concessions. The book chapters are structured to oscillate between an emphasis on material entitles and other lives (Wind, Trucks, Species) and the human intraconnections within and among them. In this project and others, I am aiming to think through the ways in which ecological authority is constituted as well as how anthropogenic climate change calls for new ways of imagining our collective biotic and material futures.

Geographical/topical area of interest: Environment, ecology, and energy; ontologies, vitalities and neomaterialisms; activism and human rights; gender and sexuality; Latin America (Mexico, Nicaragua); the Arctic (Iceland); United States. 

Name: Mary Hufford

Affiliation: Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network

Contact details: hufford.mary@gmail.com

Statement of interest: Narrative ecology and forest commons

Geographical/topical area of interest: Central Appalachian and urban neighborhoods (Philadelphia and Baltimore)