Guggenheim Project: Cause and Blame in the Anthropocene

During the 2018-19 academic year I was as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Wagner School of NYU and at the Anthropology Program at City University of New York’s Graduate Center. My project focuses on how the causes and causal analytics of climate crises become problematic and contested due to their links to responsibility, blame and possible response. This project uses cases of crisis and debates on crisis explanation, to explore how causality is treated by social scientists, climate change modelers, development practitioners and policy makers. 

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During the year I also made a brief field-research visit to Mozambique and spent some time in the areas around Chimoio to interview aid workers and farmers concerning the crisis that followed Cyclone Idai. The articles below and the Helsinki lecture, Unflattening the World, were developed leading up to and as part of this project. More is on its way.