Rate My Professor Kim Fortun

Kim Fortun is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where she joined the Department of Anthropology in summer 2017 as department chair. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Rice University (1993) and previously spent over twenty years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Science and Technology Studies. At UCI, she directs the EcoGovLab, works closely with AirUCI—an interdisciplinary unit focused on air science and governance—and serves as Research Coordinator for the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) Lab. Fortun possesses diverse organizational experience within and beyond academia and teaches courses in environmental studies, science and technology studies, and experimental ethnographic methods and research design.

An interdisciplinary, mixed-methods ethnographer, Fortun specializes in comparative studies of environmental knowledge, injustice, and governance. Her career-long focus on environmental justice originated with dissertation research on the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India. She examines technological, political, epistemic, and other factors contributing to environmental vulnerability; dynamics of vulnerability governance involving governments, experts, educators, and publics; compound and intersectional vulnerabilities, including "combo disasters" exacerbated by climate change; and knowledge infrastructures that shape societal responses to collective problems. Fortun has conducted field research in India and the United States and maintains active collaborations across East Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Cambodia). She co-founded PECE, an open-source digital platform supporting collaborative ethnographic research, now used worldwide.

Key publications include her book Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society. She is completing Late Industrialism: Making Environmental Sense. Fortun has co-edited volumes such as Major Works in Cultural Anthropology (Sage, 2010) and authored numerous articles, such as "Ethnography in Late Industrialism" (Cultural Anthropology, 2012), "Cultural Analysis in/of the Anthropocene" (Hamburg Journal of Cultural Anthropology, 2021), and "Knowledge Infrastructure and Research Agendas for Quotidian Anthropocenes" (Anthropocene Review, 2021). Her work fosters transnational networks linking researchers, educators, and policymakers to address global environmental challenges.