Caroline White-Nockleby

I am a rising second-year PhD student in MIT’s doctoral program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). My research concerns how climate change and developments in computing technologies are shifting the discourses and materialities of mining. I am also interested in the relationships between temporality and power in extractive contexts. In the MIT HASTS program, am currently conducting archival (and hopefully at some point will begin ethnographic) research to explore the intertwined histories of remote sensing and resource extraction in the central Andes in Bolivia and Chile. My work draws on my prior research on mining, climate change, and natural resource temporalities conducted during my undergraduate degree in Geology at Williams College, an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fulbright student research fellowship in northern Chile.

I am also committed to practicing engaged anthropology – to thinking deeply about how theoretical interventions might be informed by, and oriented towards, grassroots efforts. I have worked on environmental justice advocacy projects in the Northeast U.S. and the Andes region of Latin America. More recently, I have been working with the Center for Coalfield Justice, a community-based organization based in Western Pennsylvania that aims to assess and address the multivalent impacts of coal and natural gas extraction, and to move towards a just energy transition.