Kim Fortun

Kim Fortun is a Professor in the University of California Irvine’s Department of Anthropology.  Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, and on experimental ethnographic methods and research design.  Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability.  Fortun’s book Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders examines political economic, social, cultural, and discursive dynamics that produce environmental injustice.  Fortun is working on a book, Late Industrialism: Making Environmental Sense, on The Asthma Files, a collaborative project to understand how air pollution and environmental public health are dealt with in different contexts, and on design of the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), an open source digital platform for anthropological and historical research. She also helps organize the Disaster-STS Research Network and co-edits (with Scott Knowles) a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press titled Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster.  From September 2017 through August 2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies.