Theorizing Transformation in the Anthropocene

This project explores the ways in which the economic and physical processes of climate change combined with discursive and political ones to transform the range of values attached to natural resources (ocean, land, soil, forest, wildlife and microbes) thus redefining human construction of risk, intensifying competition for ecosystem services, and producing uneven vulnerabilities and new socio-political dynamics at multiple scales. In this study, I explore the ways in which adaptation and mitigation plans create new sets of risks and valuation systems that affect human and non-human actors, reconstitute socio-ecological relations, as well as social relations of production, thereby challenging our understanding of sustainability in the Anthropocene. 

Two case studies I am exploring include: the politics of carbon sequestration in Portland, Oregon; and the human and ecological consequences of ocean transformation and sand economy in Lagos.