Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation

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

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations  vii Technical Notes  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction: “Where Would I Go? There Was No Place with No Water”  1 1. Disaster Evidence  29 2. The Racial Politics of Settlers  47 3. Engineering, Archives, and Experts  69 4. Compensation and Resettlement  97 5. Love Stories  127 6. Accountability and the Militarization of Technoscience  153 7. The Ordinary  177 Conclusion: Materializing Race and Climate Change  197 Notes  205 References  221 Index  247

About the Author :
Sarah E. Vaughn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Review :
“With deep erudition and empathy, Sarah E. Vaughn illuminates the visions of society inherent to climate adaptation policy. She skillfully uncovers the stakes of this new world for us with a meticulous case study of the politics and technoscience of climate change in Guyana. Dynamic ways of living and being-the social infrastructure of climate adaptation-are revealed to be as critical as the structural projects and economic plans that undergird them. A highly original and major contribution that compels a reconsideration of environmental justice frameworks and that manifests the bold green shoots of renewed social theory.” - Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor, Institute for Advanced Study "The environmental ethics that builds from Vaughn’s counter-racial thinking makes accountability imaginable across racial divides. This is a book that helps us to create alliances that are not anchored solely in racial differences. Instead, it moves its audience to question what this difference entails, how this difference reconfigures our sense of belonging, and what this means for, and how it is inflected by, a more-than-human history and historiography under the pressing realities of climate change."   - Cindy Kaiying Lin (Public Books) “Vaughn has undertaken considerable work, and her book is a milestone, a contribution to environmental anthropology conversant with Black ecologies and geographies, heralding a wave of ethnography grappling with ecological change, lived realities of climate adaptation, and more-than-human relationships.” - Jonna M. Yarrington (Transforming Anthropology) “Vaughn provides a vital contribution to our understanding of the impact of climate change on the infrastructures that underpin collective life.” - Andrew Lakoff (American Anthropologist) “Sarah Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability is a vital contribution to anthropological conversations about how climate transformation is contouring everyday and infrastructural life-particularly in postcolonial places.” - Stefan Helmreich (Current Anthropology) “The book’s scope is not restricted to Guyana, Caribbean scholarship, or anthropology. . . . Engineering Vulnerability is a breath of creativity for the questions it makes and the paths it follows.” - Marcelo Moura Mello (New West Indian Guide) “This excellent book will be of significant interest to those invested in climate adaptation . . . It is immensely rich, and readers will undoubtedly find themselves-as I did-taking away fascinating learnings page after page.” - Sameer H. Shah (Progress in Development Studies) “A fascinating book that will be of interest to multiple fields of research across environmental politics. Vaughn’s fieldwork and archival research into water management and climate adaptation in Guyana draw a long and complex history of a low-lying coastal settlement. Nothing about this history is simple, but she manages it all deftly.” - Charlotte Kate Weatherill (Global Environmental Politics)