May 2, 2021 | Publications
In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they strengthen science and democracy. Yet opening up – whether in the name of open science, open data, open source or open government – is rarely straightforward. This essay...
Apr 28, 2020 | Publications
In light of current global efforts to ‘flatten the curve,’ this piece considers what the curve is, how varied populations are working on it, and some of the implications for anthropological thinking and theorising. It appears in a Special Forum on COVID-19...
Jun 21, 2018 | Publications
The Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga, Ontario, has launched a multi-year, multi-media, multi-publics production on human-environment entanglements, called The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea. One of us (E. Sanders) opened their inaugural broadsheet with some...
Oct 18, 2016 | Publications
In 2016, we joined a group of sociologists, political theorists, geographers, philosophers and literary scholars for the digital re-launch of the Social Science Research Council’s journal, Items: Insights from the Social Sciences. The task was to reflect on...
Sep 2, 2016 | Publications
Commercial fracking has not yet started in England. In the past few years, however, the government has issued exploratory permits in various sites around the country and energy companies are readying themselves to drill (some already have). This brief article sets out...
Aug 1, 2015 | Publications
The jury is still out – quite literally – on whether or not we are living in a new epoch called “the Anthropocene.” Even so, for many social scientists and humanities scholars, the Anthropocene is very much upon us, and this has consequences. Key among...
Mar 4, 2015 | Publications
This article won the prestigious British Sociological Association’s Climate Change Article Prize in 2015, coming in second overall among the three winning nominations. In 2016, we were invited to reflect further on the topic in a prize-winners’ workshop the...
Nov 15, 2014 | Publications
One question that has attracted considerable attention in recent years is the relation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture/society,’ and how (and if) to theorise it. This chapter provides one possible answer through a selective social history of the...
Oct 1, 2014 | Publications
This is an invited commentary on an article by Peter Rudiak-Gould, an anthropologist who has written extensively on climate change as it pertains to the Marshall Islands. It aims to extend his analysis of how to understand Marshall Islanders’ self-blame for...
Dec 5, 2013 | Publications
Increasing numbers of social and natural scientists are turning their attention to the impacts of climate change on so-called traditional peoples. This piece examines an article on the subject that appeared in a high-profile climate change journal, and that has since...
