Kim Fortun
Associate Professor

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Kim Fortun received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 1993 and now works in an interdisciplinary department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Fortun has served as an Associate Dean at RPI, and now co-edits (with Mike Fortun) Cultural Anthropology (culanth.org), the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. She is author of Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago 2001), winner (with Adriana Petryna’s book Life Exposed) of the 2003 biannual Sharon Stephens Prize awarded by the American Ethnological Society.

Fortun’s research and teaching focus on environmental health problems, and on ways ethnography can be used to understand and engage the complexities of the contemporary world.   Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to, and reduce, vulnerability to environmental risk and disaster.

Fortun’s undergraduate teaching contributes to the RPI’s new STS Sustainability Studies Program, and to the development of student capacity for independent research. Her graduate teaching focuses on research design and methods, on cultural analysis of science and technology, and on critical theories of language, knowledge and communication.