Research Expertise and Interest
anthropology, Science and Technology studies, environment, Expertise, climate change, historicism, theories of liberalism, Caribbean/Latin America
Research Description
Sarah E. Vaughn is an Associate Professor of Anthropology working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and science and technology studies. She received her B.A. in 2006 from Cornell University, majoring as a College Scholar with a focus in Anthropology, Sociology, and Inequality Studies. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. She is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology and Medicine, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Program in Development Engineering.
Vaughn’s research agenda entails developing an ethnographic approach and critical social theory of climate adaptation. This research has primarily focused on Guyana and Bermuda. She is particularly interested in the way climate adaptation addresses the politics of potentiality in cultures of engineering, wetlands and coastal-scapes, and historical narratives of settlement. Her research is based around two questions: 1) How do people imagine and confront their vulnerability to climate change? 2) How does technology mediate people’s experiences of climate change and valuation of environments? She takes a posthumanist and new materialist perspective on climate adaptation to address these questions. More broadly, she is interested in the ways technology has become an important, and at times taken for granted, object of intervention in climate adaptation projects.
Vaughn’s early research addressed these concerns by examining the social networks of accountability that inform climate adaptation projects. Her first book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation(link is external)(link is external). (2022), examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Engineering Vulnerability has been awarded the Inaugural Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award (2021) and the American Anthropological Association’s 2022 Julian Steward Award.
Vaughn’s interests in technological innovation and climate adaptation have informed her second book project, After 1.5˚C: Essays on Technological Worldmaking and Climate Change (in preparation) which asks what technology offers and does for mapping the current conditions of crisis brought on by climate change. And her other ongoing research project, Cultivating an Environmental Spirit: Finance, Climate Change, and Ethics in Bermuda explores how the reinsurance industry has become a critical site of expertise for the data-driven accounting of climate change. This research is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Archeological and Ethnographic Fieldwork Grant (2022-2024).
Vaughn’s research and writing have been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. During the 2024-2025 academic year she is the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Recent descriptions of her work can be found at the resources listed below
“Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation in conversation with Archit Guha.” New Books Network, https://newbooksnetwork.com/engineering-vulnerability(link is external)
“Under the Rubric: Engineering Ecologies, with Alice Rudge and Sarah E. Vaughn.” Comparative Studies in Society and History Online, https://cssh.lsa.umich.edu/category/under-the-rubric/(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)].
“10 Questions for Sarah E. Vaughn.” Massachusetts Review. Access, https://www.massreview.org/blog/10%20Questions(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)
"Spotlight/Ideas." Institute for Advanced Study, https://www.ias.edu/ideas/scholar-spotlight-sarah-e-vaughn(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)
“Intersectional Ecologies.” Cultures of Energy Podcast (Episode 205), https://cenhs.libsyn.com/205-intersectional-ecologies(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)
Selected Articles
2024. “The Making of Caribbean Approaches to Climate Adaptation.” Current History (123)850: 63-8.
2024. “Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation.” Critical Inquiry 50(3): 494-516.
2023. “The Morality of Investment: Stigma and Insurance in Climate Governance.” Public Culture 35(3): 393-403.
2023. "The Limits to Computational Growth: Digital Databases and Climate Change in the Caribbean." NatureCulture 6: 1-27.
2022. “Erosion by Design: Rethinking Innovation, Sea Defense, and Credibility in Guyana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64(4): 1-29.
2022. “Ecotourism’s Ethics: Self-Organization and Care in Urban Guyana.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5(2): 976-994.
2021. “On Watermarks and Fakes.” The Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs Winter: 823-833. Special Issue, “Climate Crisis,” edited by Roy Scranton.
Vaughn, Sarah E. and Daniel Fischer. 2021. “Introduction: Witnessing Environments.” Special Section, “Witnessing Environments.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2): 387-394.
2021. “Gridlock: Vigilance and Early Warning in the Shadow of Climate Change.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2): 506-520.
Vaughn, Sarah E., Bridget Guarasci, and Amelia Moore. 2021. “Intersectional Ecologies: Reimagining Anthropology and Environment.” Annual Review of Anthropology 50: 275-290.
2021. "The Aesthetics and Multiple Origin Stories of Climate Activism." Forum in Social Anthropology 29(1): 213-15.
Baker, Janelle, Paulla Ebron, Rosa Ficek, Karen Ho, Renya Ramirez, Zoe Todd, Anna Tsing, and Sarah E. Vaughn. 2020. "The Snarled Lines of Justice." Orion: People and Nature (Winter): 14-21.
2020. “Caribbean Technological Thought and Climate Adaptation.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 24(2(62)): 110-121.
2019. [Reprint]. "Disappearing Mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana." déjà lu 32(2): 441-467.
2018. "The Political Economy of Regions: Climate Change and Dams in Guyana." Radical History Review 131: 105-125.
2017. "Imagining the Ordinary in Participatory Climate Adaptation." Weather, Climate, and Society 9(3): 533-543.
2017. "Disappearing Mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana." Cultural Anthropology 32(2): 441-467.
2012. "Reconstructing the Citizen: Disaster, Citizenship, and Expertise in Racial Guyana." Critique of Anthropology 32(4): 359-386.
Book Chapters
Forthcoming [Invited]. “Thought Experiments with Technology: Climate Adaptation and Critical Humanism of/for the Global South.” In Oxford Handbook of the Global South, edited by Christopher Lee, Ann Mahler, and Monica Popescu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forthcoming [Invited]. “On Disinheritance, Intersectionality, and Environment: Zora Neale Hurston’s Florida Writers’ Project Fieldnotes.” In Handbook to Feminist Anthropology, edited by Pamela Geller. Oxford University Press.
2023. Baker, Janelle and Rosa Ficek [first authors], Paulla Ebron, Karen Ho, Renya Ramirez, Zoe Todd, Anna Tsing, and Sarah E. Vaughn [et al., equal authorship]. “From Devastation to Wonder.” In The Long 2020, edited by Richard Grusin and Maureen Ryan, pp. 274-288. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2019. "Vulnerability." In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, pp. 517-521. New York: Punctum Books.
2019. "Inundated with Facts: Flooding and the Knowledge Economies of Climate Adaptation in Guyana." In Unmasking the State: Politics, Society, and Economy in Guyana 1992-2015, edited by Arif Bulkan and D. Alissa Trotz, pp. 479-500. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers.
Books
2022. Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke University Press).
