Yale Anthropology presents a Chair’s Colloquium event featuring Dr. Sarah E. Vaughn, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Univerity of California, Berkeley.
This talk explores the intersecting socio-material and demands that engineers contront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. It focuses on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I show that engineers decision-making regarding whether or not to innovate sea defenses is a fraught process dependent upon processes of erosion and the ontological (in)stability of specific infrastructures known as groynes. Their dilemmas remind us that issues of innovation can create paralysis and haunt even the most elite spaces of climate adaptation. By this I mean that experts in climate adaptation arenas have the desire to create all kinds of affective attachments with people, things, places, and environments. Throughout this talk I focus on their desire for a different, perhaps a more hospitable kind of world-shaped by their efforts to perform and demonstrate their credibility to others.