K Fortun
Biographic Data
| ID | 13689 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Fortun |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Fortun |
| SIGNATURE | FORTUN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2770-2339 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 404 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Case Study Pedagogy in Disaster Education: Integrating Knowledge While Cultivating Epistemic Reflexivity
Research in cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) has demonstrated that environmental disasters are not only techno-scientifically and socio-politically complex but also epistemically complex -- involving perspectival diversity; multiple, often conflicting forms of evidence; data gaps and disinformation; and role transitions and confusions. Disasters, this research has demonstrated, are high…
Late Industrialism, Advocacy, and Law: Relays Toward Just Transition
A landmark citizen's lawsuit against Formosa Plastics Corporation in Seadrift, Texas resulted in funds for environmental monitoring, clean-up, research, and education.$20 million is set aside for "creating a cooperative that will revitalize depleted marine ecosystems and develop sustainable fishing, shrimping, and oyster harvesting."It is an exciting project for many reasons, exemplifying what the work of "just transition" looks like on the groun…
Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods
In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices th…
Searching for how Epistemic Power is Made, Appropriated, Circulated, and Challenged: An Interview with 2020 4S Bernal Prize Winner Sharon Traweek
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social di…
Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope
The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we desc…
Toxic Soldiers, Flickering Knowledges, and Enlisted Care: Dispossession and Environmental Injustice
Based on many years of fieldwork with US veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic subjects” through three types of toxic exposures in the history of US soldiering—from Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, to still unspecified exposures that produced Gulf War Syndrome in the first Gulf war, and to the burn pits used for waste disposal on bases throughout the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. While all toxic subjects are at odds …
Figuring Out Ethnography
Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps o…
Ethnography in Late Industrialism
An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . .On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation.The consciousness of the nonidentity between presentation and presented material forces t…
Experimental Ethnography Online: The asthma files
This essay describes The Asthma Files, an experimental, digital ethnography project structured to support a collaborative research process and new ways of presenting academic research. While examining ways in which asthma is understood, cared for and governed in varied settings, the project also examines how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses and new ways of drawing readers to…
From Latour to late industrialism
I situate Latour's latest project-An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME)-in the context of late industrialism and query both its conceptual underpinnings and the design of its digital platform. I argue that Latour's semiotics (and associated conceptions of both networks and ontologies) are functionalist in a way that mimics industrial logic, discounting both the production of hierarchical differentiation within a given system, and the system's…
Ethnography in Late Industrialism
This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that "loops," using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic…
Open Folklore as an Open Access Model
commentary, circulation, folklore, open access, research methods, archive, drupal, open journal system
Essential2life
Os autores respondem
Food security and seasonal climate information: Kenyan challenges
Transdisciplinary research strategies for understanding socially patterned disease: The Asthma Coalition on Community, Environment, and Social Stress (Access) project as a case study
As we have seen a global increase in asthma in the past three decades it has also become clear that it is a socially patterned disease, based on demographic and socioeconomic indicators clustered by areas of residence. This trend is not readily explained by traditional genetic paradigms or physical environmental exposures when considered alone. This has led to consideration of the interplay among physical and psychosocial environmental hazards an…
Poststructuralism, Technoscience, and the Promise of Public Anthropology
Cultural Critique in and of American Culture
Rethinking American Culture" was a forum featuring the work of George Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about the ways in which "new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movements of people and products, and new communications technologies are producing new ways of studying culture." This dialogue addresses the struggles over the social warrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and an…
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of “toxicogenomics.” Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity w…
The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe
Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life (review)
Reviewed by: Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life Kim Fortun (bio) Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life. Edited by Monica J. Casper. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xxxi+320. $85/$23.95. Synthetic Planet is an excellent contribution to environmental studies and also to science and technology studies. Monica Casper's volume focuses on the politics of industrial chemicals, …
From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective
This essay describes the development of information technology and culture in the environmental field since the 1980s and how this has led to new understandings of risk communication. The essay also describes how environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project particular modes of subjectivity. …
Ethnography In/Of/As Open Systems1
Ethnography in Late Industrialism
This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that "loops," using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic…
From Latour to late industrialism
I situate Latour's latest project-An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME)-in the context of late industrialism and query both its conceptual underpinnings and the design of its digital platform. I argue that Latour's semiotics (and associated conceptions of both networks and ontologies) are functionalist in a way that mimics industrial logic, discounting both the production of hierarchical differentiation within a given system, and the system's…
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of “toxicogenomics.” Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity w…
Ethnography In/Of/As Open Systems1
From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective
This essay describes the development of information technology and culture in the environmental field since the 1980s and how this has led to new understandings of risk communication. The essay also describes how environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project particular modes of subjectivity. …
An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . .On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation.The consciousness of the nonidentity between presentation and presented material forces t…
Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps o…
Counter‐expertise and the politics of collaboration
(1998). Counter‐expertise and the politics of collaboration. Science as Culture: Vol. 7, Strategizing counter-expertise, pp. 145-172
Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope
The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we desc…
The Bhopal disaster: Advocacy and expertise
(1998). The Bhopal disaster: Advocacy and expertise. Science as Culture: Vol. 7, Strategizing counter-expertise, pp. 193-216
Food security and seasonal climate information: Kenyan challenges
Remebering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability
In this essay I ask what it means to assume 'continuing liability' for the Bhopal disaster. The demand for continuing liability has been articulated by victims of the disaster and by political activists working in response to the out-of-court settlement of the Bhopal case by order of the Indian Supreme Court. When the settlement was announced, on 14 February 1989, Chief Justice Pathak argued that 'the enormity of human suffering occasioned by the…
Cultural Critique in and of American Culture
Rethinking American Culture" was a forum featuring the work of George Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about the ways in which "new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movements of people and products, and new communications technologies are producing new ways of studying culture." This dialogue addresses the struggles over the social warrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and an…
Writing Culture
These seminal essays place ethnography at the intersection of interpretive anthropology, cultural studies, social history, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. They grapple with issues of power and poetics in contemporary situations of globalization, post-coloniality, and post-modernity. Since its publication in 1986, Writing Culture has been a source of generative controversy and innovation in anthropology. It continues to in…
Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth
Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth by Alla Yaroshinskaya, et al
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 529 it by thirteen separate geographical regions. They include data on the beginning and end of various firms’ service, their routes and aircraft, etc. Further data in appendices help make this volume an impressive reference aid, particularly since information on the com muters was not compiled by government or private agencies but had to be meticulously gathered by the authors themselves. Still, Davies and Qu…
The Bhopal disaster: Advocacy and expertise
(1998). The Bhopal disaster: Advocacy and expertise. Science as Culture: Vol. 7, Strategizing counter-expertise, pp. 193-216
Counter‐expertise and the politics of collaboration
(1998). Counter‐expertise and the politics of collaboration. Science as Culture: Vol. 7, Strategizing counter-expertise, pp. 145-172
Remebering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability
In this essay I ask what it means to assume 'continuing liability' for the Bhopal disaster. The demand for continuing liability has been articulated by victims of the disaster and by political activists working in response to the out-of-court settlement of the Bhopal case by order of the Indian Supreme Court. When the settlement was announced, on 14 February 1989, Chief Justice Pathak argued that 'the enormity of human suffering occasioned by the…
Ethnography In/Of/As Open Systems1
Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life (review)
Reviewed by: Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life Kim Fortun (bio) Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life. Edited by Monica J. Casper. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xxxi+320. $85/$23.95. Synthetic Planet is an excellent contribution to environmental studies and also to science and technology studies. Monica Casper's volume focuses on the politics of industrial chemicals, …
From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective
This essay describes the development of information technology and culture in the environmental field since the 1980s and how this has led to new understandings of risk communication. The essay also describes how environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project particular modes of subjectivity. …
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of “toxicogenomics.” Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity w…
The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe
Poststructuralism, Technoscience, and the Promise of Public Anthropology
Cultural Critique in and of American Culture
Rethinking American Culture" was a forum featuring the work of George Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about the ways in which "new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movements of people and products, and new communications technologies are producing new ways of studying culture." This dialogue addresses the struggles over the social warrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and an…
Transdisciplinary research strategies for understanding socially patterned disease: The Asthma Coalition on Community, Environment, and Social Stress (Access) project as a case study
As we have seen a global increase in asthma in the past three decades it has also become clear that it is a socially patterned disease, based on demographic and socioeconomic indicators clustered by areas of residence. This trend is not readily explained by traditional genetic paradigms or physical environmental exposures when considered alone. This has led to consideration of the interplay among physical and psychosocial environmental hazards an…
Os autores respondem
Food security and seasonal climate information: Kenyan challenges
Essential2life
Open Folklore as an Open Access Model
commentary, circulation, folklore, open access, research methods, archive, drupal, open journal system
Ethnography in Late Industrialism
This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that "loops," using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic…
Experimental Ethnography Online: The asthma files
This essay describes The Asthma Files, an experimental, digital ethnography project structured to support a collaborative research process and new ways of presenting academic research. While examining ways in which asthma is understood, cared for and governed in varied settings, the project also examines how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses and new ways of drawing readers to…
From Latour to late industrialism
I situate Latour's latest project-An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME)-in the context of late industrialism and query both its conceptual underpinnings and the design of its digital platform. I argue that Latour's semiotics (and associated conceptions of both networks and ontologies) are functionalist in a way that mimics industrial logic, discounting both the production of hierarchical differentiation within a given system, and the system's…
Ethnography in Late Industrialism
An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . .On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation.The consciousness of the nonidentity between presentation and presented material forces t…
Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps o…
Figuring Out Ethnography
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Environmental ethics (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Engineering (7 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Social science (7 works)