Anthro-Engineering: Infrastructures of Climate Action in the Pacific Northwest

We propose to design and teach a new course, Infrastructures of Climate Action in the Pacific Northwest, which will examine emerging practices of climate action in the region through the conceptual lens of infrastructures as both material and social phenomena. Offered in Spring 2026, the course will focus on core challenges of climate change in the Pacific Northwest bioregion and engage students in questions of climate change ethics and community-led forms of climate action. It will be part of a series of planned classes on “Anthro-Engineering” that will foster socially embedded approaches to environmental solutions. As an Anthropology subject, the course will also introduce students to ethnographic research methods, which seek to understand the lived realities of climate change and how people make sense of them through attention to everyday experience.