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This talk asks: For whom does the computational history of the earth matter? I engage this question by examining the work of the UN-sponsored Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5C) to develop an open-access digital database. The 5C’s data collection in ‘extreme environments’ alongside the computational practices—such as coding and software development—animate what one 5C practitioner calls the Caribbean’s “cry for more data.” Activities other than data management help the 5C make sense of this lack, including international science memorandum and collaborative research workshops. This so-called conference habit is animated by the 5C’s realization that computation requires fortitude and, therefore, a reengagement with normative ideas of data collection, growth, and developmentalism. The “cry for more data” inspires the 5C’s deep commitment to not only storage but the care of data into the future for the ‘common’ good. To this extent, I treat the 5C’s digital database as a platform for a critical reading of the 1.5˚C threshold, to pose alternatives to the sequential reading of history in the face of ongoing ecological crisis.
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Sarah E. Vaughn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Vaughn’s research agenda entails developing an ethnographic approach and critical social theory of climate adaptation. This research has primarily focused on Guyana and Bermuda. Her research is based around two questions: 1) How do people imagine and confront their vulnerability to climate change? 2) How does technology mediate people’s experiences of climate change and valuation of environments? Her research and writing have been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, among others. She is the author of the award winning book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke, 2022). Currently, she is the Co-editor-in-chief of the flagship journal Cultural Anthropology.
This talk is part of the NSF SEEKCommons final convening.