About

Andrew Lakoff is a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at USC Dornsife, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Communication. He was trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, with research conducted in Argentina, France, and the United States. His areas of interest include globalization processes, the history of the human sciences, contemporary social theory, and risk society. Lakoff's scholarly work examines the role of pharmaceuticals in global psychiatry, the circulation of biomedical knowledge, and the intersections of biosecurity, public health, and security in a global context. His notable publications include the book 'Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency' and edited volumes on biosecurity and disaster politics. His research explores how expertise in public health and security is articulated and operationalized worldwide, contributing to understanding the societal impacts of technological and scientific developments in these fields.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Business
• Linguistics
• Medical emergency
• Philosophy
• Nursing
• Risk analysis (engineering)

Selected publications

• A Regulatory State of Exception

  Berghahn Books · 2025-12-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A book forum on Chloe Ahmann's <i>Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore</i> (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

  History and Anthropology · 2025-10-20

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Is Limn Obsolete?

  Limn. · 2024-11-20

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The founding editors reflect on the journal’s origins.

  PublisherDOI

• Distributed Preparedness

  2024-11-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  Disaster response in the United States traditionally has been handled by state and local governments, with the federal government playing a supporting role. Limits on the federal government's role in disaster response are deeply rooted in American tradition. State and local governments—who know the unique requirements of their citizens and geography and are best positioned to respond to incidents in their own jurisdictions—will always play a large role in disaster response. The federal government's supporting role respects these practical points and the sovereignty of the states as well as the power of governors to direct activities and coordinate efforts within their states.

  PublisherDOI

• Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation By Sarah E.Vaughn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 272 pp.

  American Anthropologist · 2023-07-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In her recent book, Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation, Sarah E. Vaughn provides a vital contribution to our understanding of the impact of climate change on the infrastructures that underpin collective life. The book is based on fieldwork conducted in Guyana between 2009 and 2019 among engineers, civil defense planners, NGO workers, farmers, and others faced with the problem of severe climate vulnerability as the sea level rises and storm surges intensify. The setting of the ethnography is framed by the aftermath of a devastating 2005 flood that has led to a range of technical efforts to estimate and mitigate the projected effects of future storms. In the book, these engineering solutions enter into a complex social and political terrain in which the history of settler colonialism, the postcolonial politics of development, and contemporary ethno-racial tensions shape Guyanese understandings of the stakes involved in climate adaptation initiatives. Vaughn's approach to this terrain builds on work in the anthropology of infrastructure and the environment, science and technology studies, and the new materialism. Engineering Vulnerability is characterized by careful attention to the material practices of hydrology experts as they seek to understand and manage a large-scale infrastructural system of water storage and flood protection. In reading the book, we learn about the difficulties of performing soil studies, about the precarity of pegasse (peat) as a dam construction material, and about competing devices for measuring water levels as part of planning infrastructure development. Beyond these technical practices, we encounter the subjective understandings and experiences that experts—including lay experts—bring to their task of mitigating climate risk. As she navigates the complex system of canals, dams, and sloughs that has been painstakingly constructed over the last century, and the neighboring enclaves whose viability relies on the system's capacity to contain hydrological flows, Vaughn is especially concerned to trace how the dynamics of racialized politics in Guyana have shaped the country's distinctive experience of climate adaptation. The key historical term here is apaan jat, or “vote for your own kind,” a term that indexes a long history of actual and perceived tensions between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese ethnic communities and political coalitions. Through its ethnographic encounters, the book holds out hope that the uncertain and precarious experience of adapting to climate change may unsettle these all-too-familiar identities and modes of political ordering. Engineering Vulnerability is thus a book that defies expectations about the relation between race, history, and the environment. It seeks to recognize, and advocate for, a novel “racial counter-knowledge” that emerges from her informants’ diverse experiences of climate adaptation. The book contributes to a growing body of work that looks at the sociotechnical implications of climate change in the Global South. This work tends to focus on the material experience of infrastructural transformation. Vaughn's analysis of Guyanese engineers’ efforts to adapt the East Demerara Water Conservancy—a vast, critical, and fragile reservoir—to an uncertain water future can be put into conversation with important recent anthropological work such as Nikhil Anand's (2017) research on water infrastructure management in Mumbai, Ashley Carse's (2014) investigation of the reengineering of the Panama Canal, and Jason Cons's (2021) analysis of climate adaptation in the southwest delta region of Bangladesh. What makes Vaughn's project distinctive in this field is its simultaneous engagement with posthumanist ethics to develop a form of counter-racial knowledge whose contours, she argues, can be detected in her informants’ engagement with the risks and uncertainties of climate change. Engineering Vulnerability will be of interest to scholars of Latin American studies, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies, as well as for those generally interested in the problem of climate change vulnerability in the Global South.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Regulatory State of Exception

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-20 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter addresses the question of “public trust” in regulatory science by examining the role of experts and government officials in the authorization of a COVID vaccine. It focuses on the period during summer and fall 2020 when there was a widespread public discussion around the vaccine regulation process. The chapter examines how, at this critical moment, key actors defended the autonomy of the regulatory process. An alliance of academic scientists, federal agency staff, and drug-industry leaders drew on the specter of vaccine hesitancy to fend off political interference. Trust in the safety of technical objects such as vaccines is often seen to depend on the objectivity of experts and the autonomy of regulatory agencies; however, the converse was the case here: experts and regulatory officials used the construct of public trust as a means to preserve their autonomy.

  PublisherDOI

• The Long Year

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

• Preparedness Indicators: Measuring the Condition of Global Health Security

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Risk analysis (engineering)

  One year before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Global Health Security Index (GHSI) ranked the United States first in the world in preparedness for the outbreak of a novel infectious disease. In turn, a number observers have asked why the US, despite this high ranking, proved to be so ill-prepared for the pandemic. This article argues that we should, rather, pose a different question about the significance of the GHSI: We should ask what “health security” meant from the perspective of this comparative index, and how it was formulated as a measurable condition. The article examines why this system for measuring and comparing pandemic preparedness among different countries was developed in the first place, what its goals were, and how these goals directed the attention of the index toward measuring certain capabilities and not others as keys to calculating and comparing levels of national readiness.

  PublisherDOI

• Limn

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021-01-15 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter centers on <italic>Limn</italic>, a scholarly magazine that focuses on tensions arising at the intersection of politics, expertise, and collective life. It describes <italic>Limn</italic> as an experiment in scholarly publishing in the interpretive human sciences that aims to make possible new kinds of communication and collective work. It also mentions Martin Høyem, who custom designed <italic>Limn</italic> with a range of imagery and graphic material related to the contributions, including a featured graphic that links diverse contributions in a common conceptual problem-space. The chapter discusses <italic>Limn</italic> as a vehicle for exploring new forms of collaboration in the interpretive human sciences. It recounts the changing field of American anthropology during the 1990s and 2000s in which discipline encouraged individualized work and valorized virtuosic interpretation and writing, with little space for collaborative inquiry.

  PublisherDOI

• Acting counter to our time

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2021-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay poses the question of the timeliness of anthropological knowledge. Paul Rabinow’s writings suggest that anthropological research has a particular relationship to the demands of the present day. The role of the anthropologist is neither that of the technical expert who can provide an instrumental solution to a given problem, nor that of an authoritative commentator who delivers a rapid assessment of the significance of an unfolding event. The essay explores a period of Rabinow’s work in which he articulated a distinctive form of anthropological engagement with present developments in the life sciences. In this work, Rabinow argued that the anthropology of the contemporary should not focus on contests over meaning and value, which tend to remain relatively stable, but instead should seek out transformations of forms, which “can provoke astonishment or arouse hatred.” The concept of assemblage, he suggested, could equip an observer to recognize such form-events as “the curious and potent singularities that they are.”

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Technocratic Expertise and the Government of Catastrophic Risk in the United States, 1950-2010

  NSF · $125k · 2011–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen J. Collier

  25 shared

• Sue Collier

  American Hospital Association

  4 shared

• Paul Rabinow

  4 shared

• Caitlin Zaloom

  New York University

  3 shared

• Arthur Kleinman

  3 shared

• Adriana Petryna

  3 shared

• Joseph Masco

  2 shared

• Vivian Choi

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER Award (2011)
• Borchard Foundation Grant (2012)
• National Science Foundation Grant (2006-2007)
• College 2020 Research Cluster in Science, Technology and Soc…