Faculty Spotlight Winter 2024
Kathryn Goldfarb (Cultural Anthropology).
My recent research project, “Knowing Air,” thinks alongside atmospheric scientists and environmental engineers to consider the creation of and engagement with air quality data as a social field to study ethnographically: from the ways that people impacted by the 2021 Marshall Fire understand indoor smoke contamination, to exploring how portable air quality monitors, and the quantitative data they provide, impact people’s qualitative experiences in the world. My collaborator Audrey Gaudel (NOAA/CIRES) and I are working on a paper examining the sorts of knowledge that environmental justice indexes offer about the social and atmospheric environment, from the perspective of anthropological and atmospheric science epistemological frameworks.
This photograph is from the American Geophysical Union conference, where I recently presented work by an interdisciplinary group of students on my “Knowing Air” project (student authors are Izzy Wallace, Seamus Klingsporn, Sara Fleming, Ian Hall, and Whitney Shapiro). Scientific conferences are fantastic spaces for participant-observation!
