We are excited to announce Professor Kim Fortun (Anthropology, University of California—Irvine) will be the keynote speaker at the 2025 Durham Workshop. Her talk, scheduled for Thursday, May 15, will be open to the public.
Professor Fortun is an interdisciplinary, mixed methods ethnographer specializing in comparative studies of environmental knowledge, injustice and governance.
At UC Irvine, she works closely with AirUCI, an interdisciplinary research unit (led by air chemists) focused on air science and governance. She also works closely with the PECE Lab, and directs the EcoGovLab. Her teaching spans environmental studies; science and technology studies; and experimental ethnographic methods and research design. She uses experimental ethnographic methods to understand how people in different geographic regions and organizations deal with environmental problems, health risks and major disasters with particular focus on industrial disasters: chemical plant explosions and massive breakdown of industrial systems.
A recurrent focus of Professor Fortun’s research has been on ways knowledge infrastructure subtends both environmental vulnerability and capacity to recognize and address such vulnerability. She examines factors (technological, political, epistemic) contributing to environmental vulnerability, how these factors are understood by different people, and the elements and dynamics of vulnerability governance, conceived to include roles for many different government agencies, expert communities, educators, and lay publics. She is especially concerned about compound, intersectional vulnerability and what she describes as “combo disaster”—resulting from ways problems in any one system (atmospheric, political, ecological, technological) interlace with and exacerbate problems in other systems.
Professor Fortun has done extensive field research in India and the United States, and have active collaborations across East Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Cambodia) and helped develop digital research infrastructure to support distributed, collaborative research and teaching.
