Professor named to nine-member task force

Provost Professor of Anthropology Richard Wilk was recently appointed to the American Anthropological Association’s nine-member Global Climate Change Task Force.

The task force is a new addition to the association. The association’s president, Virginia Dominguez, said she wants to bring contributions within anthropology into focus and engage further in policy discourse.

“Today, more anthropologists across all subfields engage with climate research, and more anthropologists witness its often deleterious effects on the sustainability of human livelihoods and sociocultural systems, both past and present,” Dominguez said in a press release. “While biogeophysical scientists and governmental bodies decry climate changes and ecological effects, anthropologists’ sociocultural and archaeological interpretations are less well known.”

With the available resources, anthropologists are able to interpret from a variety of perspectives and multiple scales, including ethnographic and archaeological understandings of effects on livelihoods, identities and culture and the asymmetries in global power dynamics and inequities associated with global climate change policies and responses, Wilk said in the press release.

The task force’s priorities include facilitating anthropological contributions and interdisciplinary research, according to the press release. Task force members said they hope to produce a document acting as a guide to recognizing anthropological contributions to global-climate-change issues.

— Michael Majchrowicz