Dr. Amelia Fiske

Amelia Fiske is a cultural anthropologist, interested in the toxic entanglements of life, extraction, and science. Thinking across and within the disciplines of environmental studies, feminist science studies, and medical anthropology, her research addresses the effects of extractive industries on people and places, sensorial experiences of toxic exposure and struggles for environmental justice, and public debates over knowledge production at the intersection of science and medicine. Her doctoral research investigated how the effects of the oil industry are made manifest, paying specific attention to the techniques that expert and lay people use to apprehend and address harm in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the UNC Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the Mitchell Foundation. At present, she is a senior research fellow at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel researching the ethical, political, and social implications of citizen science of biomedicine and bioscience. While at the RCC, she is working on a comparative ethnographic project that traces toxicity through aesthetic and sensory practices, and their relations with struggles for environmental justice.

Selected publications:

• “Governing Natural Resources by Numbers: The Promise of ‘El uno por mil’ in Ecuador’s Yasuní ITT Oil Operations.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 8, no. 1 (2017): 125–143.
• “Bounded Impacts, Boundless Promise: Environmental Impact Assessments of Oil Production in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” In ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements and Alternative Futures, edited by Kirk Jalbert Anna Willow, David Casagrande, and Stephanie Paladino. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• “Attending to the Senses in Toxic Exposure.” In “Sensorial Engagements with a Toxic World.” Special Series in Second Spear. Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2017).
• “Bearing Witness through Soil Coring.” In Environmental Justice and Citizen Science in a Post Truth Age, edited by Thom Davies and Alice Mah. Manchester University Press, forthcoming.