Amelia Moore

I am an environmental anthropologist with over twenty years of experience studying island and coastal politics, the social effects of transnational environmental science and technology, and the inequities exacerbated by major global environmental changes like climate change, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss. I attempt to rigorously center equity and justice praxis in my research, teaching, and service within interdisciplinary STEM programs. This means working with a critical mass of experienced scholars to build a cohesive vision, committed leadership, and structural support for transformative program development. 

My scholarship is multi-sited, including multiple geographic areas and problems, but it has always been designed to explore the effects of injustices like colonialism, white supremacy, knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary technologies, extractive geopolitics, and racial capitalism on environmental inequities like small island vulnerability, coastal dispossession, and climate imperialism. Empirically grounded in ethically oriented ethnographic praxis, I have focused on the foundational inequities that shape the relationships between environmental scientists and the people most impacted by their projects. My work has shown that it is not enough to design science-based environmental law and policy to ameliorate surface level inequities based in simple observations of the status quo. Instead, a deeper understanding of historical, contemporary, and potential future inequities is needed, along with the capacity to gauge how foundational inequities produce feedback loops across generations, molding technologies, techniques, concepts, and questions, transforming land and seascapes, and limiting the possibility to define what constitutes justice and the environment in the first place. My work informs governance institutions and policy interventions in directly accounting for these wide-ranging, largely hidden processes so they may more equitably address the world’s most pressing environmental problems.