Sarah is a Research Associate with the Climate Change, Disasters, and Development cluster at SEI Asia working on climate change adaptation and resilience in the context of disaster risk reduction and recovery. She joined SEI Asia in January 2022. She is particularly interested in the intersecting vulnerabilities of at-risk communities in Southeast Asia and the role of social suffering in climate resilience. Themes include gendered vulnerability and adaptive capacity, networks of care and reciprocity, formal and informal economies, and the affective dimensions of climate resilience (uncertainty, fear, hope, etc.) in post-disaster contexts.
Prior to SEI, Sarah conducted fieldwork exploring the sociocultural dimensions of land use, biodiversity conservation, eco-tourism, and more-than-human relations in multiple contexts: Japan, Tanzania, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. Her work within the cluster focuses on unpacking vulnerabilities to climate shocks and exploring how notions of risk and uncertainty operate within forms of governance, scientific practice, and the politics of the everyday. Her ongoing projects at SEI raise questions that foster new imaginings of how adaptation processes could transform the social infrastructure of climate resilience, while also acknowledging the neoliberal politics ofdisaster recovery and their potential for maladaptation.
Sarah received a Master of Science (MSc) in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford where her research was situated within environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and critical social theory. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Science from Colorado College.