Kim Fortun is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on environmental injustice and governance, experimental ethnography, and the poetics and politics of knowledge infrastructure.

Fortun’s research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health hazards, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability. Fortun’s publications include  Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (2001), “Ethnography in Late Industrialism” (2012) and “Cultural Analysis in/of the Anthropocene” (2021). 

Fortun’s  current research includes a study of environmental injustice in Santa Ana, California;  a study and archive focused on the operations of Formosa Plastics Corporation (collaborating with a global network of environmental researchers and activists); and a collaboration with  environmental justice educators to build teaching and learning capacity across borders, linking K-12 schools, universities, community-based organizations, and government agencies. Fortun is the lead instructor for UCI Anthro 25A, “Environmental Injustice,” a large, general education course that extends from EcoGovLab research. 

From 2005-2010, Fortun co-edited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. September 2017- 2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies. Fortun now co-edits (with historians Scott Knowles and Jacob Remes) a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press, Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster and  is in the  design group for both The Asthma Files and the Disaster-STS Network. Fortun co-directs the EcoGovLab. 

Fortun  received a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Rice University in 1993 then worked for over twenty years in an interdisciplinary department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She moved to UCI in 2017.

Learn more about Kim Fortun here.