The Global School Forum Presents: Erosion By Design: Sea Defenses in Guyana
3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Dr. Sarah Vaughn (UC Berkeley, Anthropology)
Erosion by Design: Sea Defenses in Guyana
Friday, September 8th at 3:30pm
in The Campus Center, Odeum A&B
Reception to welcome the speaker to follow
This talk will explore the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. Focusing on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene, this work draws on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research. Vaughn shows how 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. These dilemmas remind us that issues of innovation can create paralysis and haunt even the most elite spaces of climate adaptation. Experts in climate adaptation arenas have the desire to create all kinds of affective attachments with people, things, places, and environments. Vaughn focuses 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.