Kim Fortun

I received a PhD from Rice University’s Department of Anthropology in 1993 then worked for over twenty years in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s interdisciplinary department of Science and Technology Studies. I joined the University of California Irvine Department of Anthropology in summer 2017 (as department chair), drawn to the department’s reputation for methodological innovation. Since joining UCI, I have worked closely with AirUCI, an interdisciplinary research unit (led by air chemists) focused on air science and governance. I also work closely with the PECE Lab, and direct the EcoGovLab.

I am an interdisciplinary, mixed methods ethnographer specializing in comparative studies of environmental knowledge, injustice and governance. I teach environmental studies; science and technology studies; and experimental ethnographic methods and research design. I have diverse organizational experience within and beyond the university, collaborate extensively  with communities where I do research, and am helping build transnational networks that connect researchers in new ways. 

Environmental justice has been the focus of my research and teaching for my entire career, beginning with dissertation research (in the early 1990s) focused on the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India, still considered the “world’s worst industrial disaster.” The harms, suffering, injustice and governance incapacities that I learned about in that early researcher continue to motivate my work today.

My research examines factors (technological, political, epistemic, etc) 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. I am especially concerned about compound, intersectional vulnerability and what I have come to think of as “combo disaster” – resulting from ways problems in any one system (atmospheric, political, ecological, technological) interlace with and exacerbate problems in other systems. The ways racism intersects with pollution, producing environmental injustice is an obvious example. The ways industry influence on educational programs delimits what counts as science and usable knowledge, in turn shaping laws and policies that protect (or fail to protect) the environment and environmental public health, is another example. Climate change produces especially powerful combo disasters – that easily overwhelm available means of understanding and addressing associated problems. 

A recurrent focus of my  research has been on ways knowledge infrastructure subtends both environmental vulnerability and capacity to recognize and address such vulnerability. I thus have become increasingly invested in understanding and helping build knowledge infrastructure (including educational programs at all levels, supporting technical infrastructure, public data resources, analytic and visualization capabilities, and the organizational forms needed to support and connect these). Knowledge infrastructures powerfully shape how societies anticipate, characterize, and deal with collective problems. Given the tangles of problems contemporary societies face — and need to work on together — building deeply interdisciplinary knowledge capacity with global scope is a high priority. This will be far from straightforward, depending on inventive project designs linking researchers across disciplines, generations, and geographies; linking research to education at all levels; and building new connections between universities, schools, governments, international organizations, businesses and other social actors. These have become key aims of my work, interlacing my research, teaching and organizational interests. 

I have done extensive field research in India and the United States, and have active collaborations across East Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Cambodia). I have also helped develop digital research infrastructure to support distributed, collaborative research and teaching. The Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), open source  software supporting virtual research environments, is now freely available as a Drupal distro on GitHub. PECE is especially designed for qualitative researchers but has potential for application across fields, providing a way to preserve and curate the qualitative commentary that is part of all collaborative research workflows. The PECE Lab runs multiple instances of PECE (DisasterSTS Network, STS Infrastructures and for the Center for Ethnography, among others), using side-by-side development to orient further technical development. I’m a founding designer of PECE, and now serve as PECE Research Coordinator. PECE now has users around the world, working on a rich array of projects.