Aunty: A Prayer for the World

DESCRIPTION: For the past decade, because of the unprecedented changes that the people who Dr. West has worked with in Papua New Guinea since 1997 now have to understand and contend with in their daily lives, Dr. West has conducted a multi-sited study of climate-change related epistemic / knowledge making practices. In the research she has asked: How do diverse groups of people make new knowledge about the changing climate? Are those knowledge making processes transforming along with the biophysical environments in which people live? Do people’s understandings of, and knowledge about, the places they live transform as their knowledge about climate change transforms? Are the affective connections that people have with place also changing as those places are transformed by climate related events? Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. West is writing a book about this research.