“With deep erudition and empathy, Sarah E. Vaughn illuminates the visions of society inherent to climate adaptation policy. She skillfully uncovers the stakes of this new world for us with a meticulous case study of the politics and technoscience of climate change in Guyana. Dynamic ways of living and being—the social infrastructure of climate adaptation—are revealed to be as critical as the structural projects and economic plans that undergird them. A highly original and major contribution that compels a reconsideration of environmental justice frameworks and that manifests the bold green shoots of renewed social theory.” - Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor, Institute for Advanced Study
“Grounded in the muddy embankments and overspilling canals that once protected Guyana from the encroaching sea, Sarah Vaughn’s ethnography of engineering, disaster management, and climate adaptation challenges us to rethink how vulnerability intersects with the lived experience of race and racism. This book is crucial reading for anyone seeking to understand how vulnerable populations assert their own expertise and practical solutions for living with hazards of the Anthropocene.” - Mimi Sheller, Dean of the Global School, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
"For those in science and technology studies or with interests in the studies of infrastructure, for example, the book offers a dexterous study of technological optimism in action, analyzing how engineers and large engineering projects become the privileged solution to climate change’s frightening uncertainties. Here Vaughn deftly uses the work of Karen Barad, one of the book’s key theoretical touchstones, to illuminate the constitutive role of measurement in such future-making work. The book’s core contribution, though, is to studies of race and climate change. . . ." - Timothy Neale, American Ethnologist
"The environmental ethics that builds from Vaughn’s counter-racial thinking makes accountability imaginable across racial divides. This is a book that helps us to create alliances that are not anchored solely in racial differences. Instead, it moves its audience to question what this difference entails, how this difference reconfigures our sense of belonging, and what this means for, and how it is inflected by, a more-than-human history and historiography under the pressing realities of climate change."
- Cindy Kaiying Lin, Public Books
“Vaughn has undertaken considerable work, and her book is a milestone, a contribution to environmental anthropology conversant with Black ecologies and geographies, heralding a wave of ethnography grappling with ecological change, lived realities of climate adaptation, and more-than-human relationships.” - Jonna M. Yarrington, Transforming Anthropology
“Vaughn provides a vital contribution to our understanding of the impact of climate change on the infrastructures that underpin collective life.” - Andrew Lakoff, American Anthropologist
“Sarah Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability is a vital contribution to anthropological conversations about how climate transformation is contouring everyday and infrastructural life—particularly in postcolonial places.” - Stefan Helmreich, Current Anthropology
“The book’s scope is not restricted to Guyana, Caribbean scholarship, or anthropology. . . . Engineering Vulnerability is a breath of creativity for the questions it makes and the paths it follows.” - Marcelo Moura Mello, New West Indian Guide
“This excellent book will be of significant interest to those invested in climate adaptation . . . It is immensely rich, and readers will undoubtedly find themselves—as I did—taking away fascinating learnings page after page.” - Sameer H. Shah, Progress in Development Studies
“Vaughn’s book makes an important contribution to the scholarship on climate adaptation.” - Joshua Mullenite and Katinka Wijsman, Journal of Anthropological Research
“A fascinating book that will be of interest to multiple fields of research across environmental politics. Vaughn’s fieldwork and archival research into water management and climate adaptation in Guyana draw a long and complex history of a low-lying coastal settlement. Nothing about this history is simple, but she manages it all deftly.” - Charlotte Kate Weatherill, Global Environmental Politics
"In Engineering Vulnerability, Sarah Vaughn tightly weaves together several intimately related ethnographic examinations of climate change adaptation along the coastal plain of Guyana. . . . Vaughn has crafted an engaging and accessible read that makes several compelling interventions into various anthropological domains. She rejects casting Guyana at the margins of Caribbean and Latin American affairs, and instead treats it as an important center. . . . This is an ethnographic case to place in conversation with other cases for some time to come." - A. J. Faas, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
"[Vaughn's] research details how racialized politics unsettle communal, national, and technical machinations toward climate adaptation in the post-development era in Guyana." - Javiera Araya-Moreno, Melanie Ford & Katie Ulrich, Tapuya
“In a highly original contribution that highlights desires for a future less ordered by race in a place defined by water, Vaughn argues that climate adaptation can be a world-making act in which people pursue counter-racial grounds for continued coastal settlement.” - Rhys Anil Madden, Ethnos
