Congratulations!Coral O'Brian successfully defended her doctoral thesis

20 December 2024

Photo: private

From left to right: Prof. Dr. Michael Schnegg, Coral O'Brian, Prof. Dr. Simone Rödder

We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our CLICCS B1 team member Coral Iris O’Brian.

Her dissertation “Bound by Fire: The Affective Layer of Forest Futures in Flagstaff, Arizona” was supervised by Prof. Dr. Michael Schnegg (Social and Cultural Anthropology) and Prof. Dr. Simone Rödder (Sociology). Coral’s research was carried out in the Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” Project B1, “Social Constructions of Climate Futures”. 

Coral O’Brian’s dissertation monograph starts from the proposition that affect shapes social space, relationships, and agency to a degree which has been so far unacknowledged in the social study of climate futures. She specifies this interest by focusing conceptually on a phenomenological and practice-based theoretical approach to affect theory and through ethnographic fieldwork as methodology. Coral’s empirical case is the United States’ mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona, known for recreational tourism and forestry, and which was a historically booming site of the timber industry. This history produced political, economic and legal tensions between loggers and environmentalists, as well as a prominent collaborative forest management project in recent years. Many of her interlocutors expressed that Flagstaff’s surrounding ponderosa pine forests are constitutive of both what the town is and what it means to them, and as such, Flagstaff is introduced as a relevant case for the study of climate futures in general and forest futures in particular. From her twelve months of fieldwork on site, Coral concluded that Flagstaff residents are affected by increasing wildfires through an overarching affective layer, which she terms the firesphere, that influences how diverse social groups in Flagstaff relate to fire, forest futures, and each other. 

Well done, Coral!