Revisiting the Anthropocene Islands

I have been referring to myself as an island scholar for many years. My research has been focused on island nations and island travel destinations in The Bahamas, Indonesia, and the eastern US. These places have contributed to my understanding of "islandness" and its evolving characteristics. My first book, Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas (2019), articulated the concept of "the Anthropocene Islands" as the material/semiotic crucible of environmental science, international tourism, and global environmental change unevenly shaping island realities and relations in the 21^st century.  In the years since I finalized the argument for that book, I have undergone a personal and professional sea change, becoming ever more concerned with anti-disciplinarity, dismantling supremacy, and environmental (in)justice as the organizing frameworks for my scholarly praxis. In this talk, I will revisit some of my island research projects and experiences in order to explain how they shaped my anthropological understanding of the world as well as the ongoing transformation of that understanding. My goal is to share the points of tension and inspiration that I take from my own experience as an anthropologist in order to instigate a conversation about our collective transformational capacity and the changes we are attempting to foment in our professional programs. 

Bio: I am an environmental anthropologist with over twenty years of experience studying island and coastal politics, the social effects of transnational environmental science and technology, and the inequities exacerbated by major global environmental changes like climate change, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss. I attempt to rigorously center equity and justice praxis in my research, teaching, and service within interdisciplinary STEM programs. This means working with a critical mass of experienced scholars to build a cohesive vision, committed leadership, and structural support for transformative program development.

My scholarship is multi-sited, including multiple geographic areas and problems, but it has always been designed to explore the effects of injustices like colonialism, white supremacy, knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary technologies, extractive geopolitics, and racial capitalism on environmental inequities like small island vulnerability, coastal dispossession, and climate imperialism. Empirically grounded in ethically oriented ethnographic praxis, I have focused on the foundational inequities that shape the relationships between environmental scientists and the people most impacted by their projects. My work has shown that it is not enough to design science-based environmental law and policy to ameliorate surface level inequities based in simple observations of the status quo. Instead, a deeper understanding of historical, contemporary, and potential future inequities is needed, along with the capacity to gauge how foundational inequities produce feedback loops across generations, molding technologies, techniques, concepts, and questions, transforming land and seascapes, and limiting the possibility to define what constitutes justice and the environment in the first place. My work informs governance institutions and policy interventions in directly accounting for these wide-ranging, largely hidden processes so they may more equitably address the world’s most pressing environmental problems.