Engineering Vulnerability

Abstract

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.<br><br>Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Projects for queering disaster: reciprocal knowledge exchange and practice

“…We asked participants to identify key actors and organizations working to address hazards in their communities because sensibilities of vulnerability often inspire creative action (Vaughn, 2022;von Meding, 2021;Marino and Faas, 2020;Butler, 2009), but also because we anticipate that action around one hazard can translate into action around others, like the Hayward fault. Chiefly, those named were community groups like the Billy DeFrank Center, the local Business and Neighborhood Association, and the San Jos e Police Department.…”

Restoration otherwise: Towards alternative coastal ecologies

“…The limited scope of ecological crisis and "decontextualization" (Jessee, 2022) of the settler colonial and racialized roots of coastal engineering are particularly troubling for communities worldwide who find themselves disproportionately on the frontlines of weathering not only global climate change, but experiments in climate change adaptation projects and policies (Barra, 2021;Jessee, 2020a;Maldonado, 2018;Marino, 2014;Vaughn, 2022). Adaptation practices narrowly built upon cost-benefits models and scientific reason risk reproducing racial and economic inequalities in ways that continue to devalue the lives, livelihoods, lands, and futures of economically and geographically marginalized communities (Marino, 2018).…”

Black Water Politics: Navigating Oral History, Memory, and Power Along the Rivers of the Guyanese Northwest

“…14 14 For the critical role of water management in Guyanese history and society also see the work of Sarah E. Vaugn (2023), Catherine Peters (2022), and Gordon Gill (2004). …”