Kim Fortun Collaboration Bio - ESTS Open Data Workshop 12.2022

I am a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine, and director of the EcoGovLab. My research and teaching focus on environmental injustice and governance, experimental ethnography, and the poetics and politics of knowledge infrastructure. 

A recurrent focus of my research has been  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. Supporting the development of open research data (and supporting infrastructure) is an important part of this work. 

For almost a decade, I've been involved in the development of the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), open source  software supporting virtual research environments. PECE 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.  PECE now has users around the world, working on a rich array of projects.