Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation

by Sarah E. Vaughn

In Engineering Vulnerability Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and, more broadly, future life on a warming planet.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

272 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2022

Reviews

[Rhys Madden · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://doi-org.lse.idm.oclc.org/10.1...

...This book will be of interest to those working on race, climate, infrastructure and technology, as well as future orientation and belonging. Vaughn also positions it as a call for anthropologists to realise their own risk in ‘engineering vulnerability’ when talking about race and climate change. Her suggestion, and the book’s major contribution, is to focus on the everyday realities that make race relevant to people, but which can also limit their political imaginations of climate change...