Kim Fortun received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 1993 and is author of Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago 2001). She co-edits (with Mike Fortun) Cultural Anthropology (culanth.org), the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.  

Fortun's research and teaching focus on environmental health problems, and on developing ethnography as a way to understand and engage the complexities of the contemporary world.   Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to, and reduce, vulnerability to environmental risk and disaster.
 
Fortun's undergraduate teaching contributes to our new Sustainability Studies Program, and to the development of student capacity for independent research. Her graduate teaching focuses on research design and methods, on cultural analysis of science and technology, and on critical theories of language, knowledge and communication.

Her Curriculum Vitae (CV) is also available for download.

Her website is located at http://www.fortuns.org/?page_id=3.

CURRENT PROJECTS
Informating Environmentalism, a book manuscript that examines how information technology, theory and culture have shaped the environmental field over the last two decades.

The Asthma Files, a collaborative, web-based project to draw together and explicate multiple perspectives on asthma – from different scientific disciplines, from health care providers and patients, and from different geographic locales.

Strategizing Transdisciplinarity: From Exposure Assessment to Exposure Science, an NSF funded study focused on recent developments in environmental exposure science.

Experiments in Ethnography, a collection of essays that explicates the methods and potential of ethnography.


RECENT PUBLICATIONS

edited volumes

2009: Major Works in Cultural Anthropology, Vol 1-4: Moorings, Modernities, Emergence, Engagements. Sage (co-edited with Mike Fortun).

essays

2009: "Environmental Right-To-Know and the Transmutations of Law," Catastrophe: Law, Politics and the Humanitarian Impulse edited by Austin Sarat. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

2009: "Figuring Out Ethnography," Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition edited by James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

2009: "Scaling and Visualizing Multi-sited Ethnography," Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research edited by Mark Falzon. London: Ashgate.

2009: "Introduction," Major Works in Cultural Anthropology, Vol 1-4: Moorings, Modernities, Emergence, Engagements edited by Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun. Sage (co-authored with Mike Fortun).

2006: "Poststructuralism, Technoscience and the Promise of Public Anthropology," India Review Vol 5. No 2-3.  Fall.

2005: "Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology," American Anthropologist.  Vol 107. No 1.  March. (co-authored with Mike Fortun)

2004: "Environmental Information Systems and Appropriate Technology," Design Issues Vol 20. No.3. Fall.  

2004: "From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmental Health: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective," OSIRIS (Special issue: Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments, edited by Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy and Christopher Sellers) Vol 19.

2003: "Ethnography In/Of/As Open Systems," p171-190 Reviews in Anthropology Vol 32/2.

2002: "Review Essay: Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof." Ethics, Place and Environment. Vol 5/1. March.