SPEAKERS

 


 

 

We are delighted to announce our keynote speakers for Energy Ethics 2021:

Dr Dana Powell

Dana E. Powell is an environmental anthropologist who studies the cultural politics of energy infrastructure in rural and indigenous communities. Her commitment to environmental justice is grounded in feminist political ecology, decolonial theory, and collaborative ethnography. Dr Powell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Appalachian State University in western North Carolina and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Center for International Indigenous Affairs at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan.  

Powell received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she held the Royster Society of Fellows’ Sequoyah Fellowship. Her book, Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation (Duke Press, 2018) explores how Diné-led activism against a coal plant slated for tribal land animated public debates about the interface between sovereignty and environmentalism, galvanizing movements for a new environmental ethics. That project formed the basis for a subsequent project on toxicity and transition, extending her longstanding collaborations with Diné academics and public intellectuals. Powell’s more recent project examines community responses to the intersection of extractive industries and climate change in the rural coastal plains of North Carolina, and she is presently exploring a comparative project with environmental and Indigenous studies scholars in Taiwan. 

Professor Kim Fortun

Professor Kim Fortun is a cultural anthropologist focused on environmental risk and disaster, experimental ethnographic methods and research design, and the poetics and politics of data infrastructure. Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability.

Having received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 1993, Professor Fortun went on to work for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI)  interdisciplinary department of Science and Technology Studies (RPI STS). In 2017, she joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, as department chair. Professor Fortun served for two years President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), between 2017 and 2019.

Over the last few years, Professor Fortun has helped to build the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), developing a variety of experimental design projects responsive to her ethnographic research.