Maya Daurio (PhD candidate) was featured in Engagement, the official blog of the Anthropology and Environment Society (AES), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). It features first-hand accounts by anthropologists and other social scientists who bring an anthropological approach to understanding the pressing environmental issues of our time.
Maya’s article Temporal Recalibrations: Learning to See in the Liminal Spaces of Post-Wildfire Landscapes was published in July 2023. In it, she looks at Poudre Canyon, Colorado before and after a devastating wildfire, and asks:
What does it means to live in paradise following disaster of this magnitude? How do people make sense of these rapidly occurring landscape-scale changes? What can an engagement with the different temporalities of the material formations made visible by the wildfire and its aftermath help us understand about the ecological, geomorphological, and climatic histories and futures of this place?
This essay shows that time, agency, and knowledge structures are recalibrated by “assemblages” (Tsing 2019: 232) of human and other than human relations that emerge in the wildfire’s wake
