Disaster Analytics, Hermeneutics, Poetics and Pedagogies: Building Disaster Studies, Remooring Academia

The Disaster Studies Initiative at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to present

Kim Fortun
Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine

Kim Fortun is a Professor in the University of California Irvine (UCI) Department of Anthropology, Director of UCI EcoGovLab, and member of AirUCI. She also collaborates extensively with community-based environmental justice organizations, and is part of the Design Group for the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), an open source/access digital platform for anthropological and historical research. 

Fortun’s research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, experimental ethnographic methods and research design, and the poetics and politics of knowledge infrastructure. Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health harms, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability. Fortun’s book Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders (2001) launched a career-spanning focus on environmental and disaster governance.

Fortun’s recent writing has examined the praxis of diverse environmental advocates, and reads the Anthropocene as a call for new kinds of collaboration and knowledge infrastructure. Toward the latter, Fortun helps lead the Environmental Injustice Global Record, a collaborative initiative to build an expansive archive and set of analyses  demonstrating the dynamics of environmental injustice in different settings. One  project aim is to connect geographically distributed people working on related  problems, within and beyond university. Another is to to build a digital knowledge commons supporting continuing environmental governance research, teaching and advocacy.

From 2005 to 2010, Fortun co-edited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. From 2017 to 2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies. Currently, Fortun co-edits a book series, "Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster", and the recently launched Journal of Disaster Studies, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She also leads development of the Disaster STS Network (DSTS) digital platform, an instance of PECE established in the wake of Japan’s 3-11 disaster.

This talk is the Opening Keynote of the CMES conference Disasters in and of the Middle East: Event, Place, Intensity, organized by Cemal Kafadar, Elif Irem Az, Jesse Howell, and Evangeline McGlynn.

Co-sponsor: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Contact: Liz Flanagan