Adriana Petryna
· Francis E. Johnston Endowed Term Professor; Graduate Chair, Anthropology; Director, MD-PhD Program in Anthropology (Penn Medical Scientist Training Program)VerifiedUniversity of Pennsylvania · Anthropology
Active 1993–2024
About
Adriana Petryna is a Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also directs the MD-PhD program in Anthropology. Her ethnographic studies in Eastern Europe and the United States explore the socio-political aspects of science, examining how populations are enrolled in experimental knowledge-production and the implications for citizenship and ethics. She is the author of award-winning books such as Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects, and co-editor of works including Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices and When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Her concepts of biological citizenship, ethical variability, and experimentality have significantly advanced the critical social scientific understanding of environmental disasters, biomedical research, and global health issues. Her recent work, Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change, examines the climate crisis through the lens of “horizoning,” focusing on experiments probing planetary points of no return and the stories of wildland firefighters. Petryna’s research has been supported by numerous prestigious institutions, and she has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University. At Penn, she also directs the undergraduate concentration in Medical Anthropology and Global Health.
Research signals
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Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Engineering
- Mathematics
- Mechanical engineering
- Political economy
- History
- Criminology
- Geometry
- Law
Selected publications
Current Anthropology · 2024-07-31 · 3 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe impacts of climate change are accelerating worldwide, but emergency agencies and political bodies are not always equipped to anticipate where, when, or how severe the next unnatural disaster will be. Amid megafire seasons, for example, scientists are revising models of fire behavior that were calibrated to natures that increasingly diverge from known baselines and trends. Emergency responders’ trust in patterns has become an occupational hazard. At these edges of knowledge, struggles to maintain responsive capacity in disrupted ecologies are at play; a larger reckoning with runaway climate change as a relational problem space is in order. Rather than making me resort to despair about the world’s “end,” such labors redirect my attention toward horizons of expectation in which knowledges are still actionable, not obsolete, and where capacities for future interventions are viable and not denied. These activities, enmeshed in a rubric of horizon work, shift expert authority and promote critical realignments across political, activist, and Indigenous spheres.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · 2024-04-12
article1st authorCorresponding3 In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change
2023-03-16
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingMeeting Things Where They Are: Horizon Thinking amid Complex Futures
General Anthropology · 2023-09-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingDe‐occupation as planetary politics
American Ethnologist · 2023 · 10 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
Abstract Russia's attempted occupation of Ukraine informs a concept of de‐occupation in an age of 21st‐century planetary wars. The tide of war crimes committed in Ukraine is beyond dispute, having been identified by legal scholars as genocidal attempts to condemn the very foundations of livelihood. I discuss the precedents that have allowed such crimes to occur and describe how Ukrainians are trying to counter these crimes, forming a particular kind of resistance that strikes against impunity. I locate impunity's persistence within post‐Soviet spheres, where solidarities among civilians who have been subject to Russian militarization complicate the view that the war in Ukraine is just another proxy war between superpowers. Given the dearth of architectures of peace and security to prevent genocide, de‐occupation emerges as a process in which de‐occupied people not only restore their territory but also play a central role in asserting less ruinous, more livable planetary futures.
2023-02-27
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPrinceton University Press eBooks · 2022 · 22 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Mathematics
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-04-06
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2022 · 2 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Mathematics
- Engineering
- Mechanical engineering
Anthropology Now · 2021-01-02
article1st authorCorrespondingAn almost vertical line showing an increase of atmospheric CO2 emissions captures the urgency of a changing climate like no other line. Yet lines are also insufficient for grasping what might come ...
Recent grants
Climate Complexity and Emergency Response
NSF · $25k · 2016–2018
Frequent coauthors
- 14 shared
João Biehl
Princeton University
- 4 shared
Arthur Kleinman
- 3 shared
Andrew Lakoff
- 3 shared
Joseph J Amon
- 2 shared
Mariana P. Socal
Johns Hopkins University
- 2 shared
Paulo Dornelles Picon
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
- 1 shared
Tiffany Romain
National Autonomous University of Nicaragua
- 1 shared
Hugh Gusterson
Labs
Awards & honors
- Guggenheim Fellow
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