About

Dominic Boyer is a writer, media maker and anthropologist, whose work focuses on the energy and environmental challenges of our era, particularly the need to decarbonize society and to break the ecocidal trajectory of global capitalism.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Data Mining
• History
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Data science
• Cognitive science
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Psychology
• Media studies
• Law
• Public relations
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• “Aldea global, dislocación, fantasías de la derecha, capital financiero, realismo especulativo, descargas, horror feliz, juegos de rol”

  Cuadernos LIRICO · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tracking extinct glaciers in GLIMS

  Annals of Glaciology · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS), an initiative to build and distribute a database of global glacier data, has recently begun to track glaciers that have recently disappeared. GLIMS provides a definition of “extinct” glaciers for our community, and the final determination of extinction is left to local experts. There are currently 181 glaciers in the GLIMS Glacier Database that are marked as “extinct”, though we recognize that there have been many more reported in the literature. GLIMS welcomes more submissions to make the list more complete.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Communication efforts to educate the public about vanishing glaciers, 1958–2025

  Annals of Glaciology · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This letter reviews public communication efforts addressing glacial loss from 1958 to 2025, tracing a trajectory from early educational films to contemporary ritual performances. It examines how documentaries, visual media, fiction and immersive technologies have sought to translate cryospheric decline into emotionally resonant narratives that inform and inspire climate action. Particular attention is given to the recent rise of performative and ritual practices, including glacier funerals and the Global Glacier Casualty List, which commemorate disappearing glaciers while fostering affective engagement and ethical reflection. The authors argue that interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists, artists and communities remain vital for amplifying public awareness and catalyzing environmental response.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Afterword: Less is the New More

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2025-04-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This afterword to the special issue discusses the author’s affective experiences with energy transition. The particular focus is the affective promise of electrification as a means to rupture the ecological emergency generated by today’s petroculture.

  PublisherDOI

• Cascades of Un/Becoming: How Blackouts Impact Transitional Electropolitics

  Science Technology & Human Values · 2025-09-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Blackouts, though typically dismissed as momentary disruptions, can catalyze sweeping shifts in energy governance and public consciousness. In examining the 2016-2017 blackout in South Australia and the 2021 Texas Freeze, we introduce transitional electropolitics to capture how these infrastructural crises reveal both the fragility of incumbent fossil-fuel regimes and the potential for rapid transitions. We show how blackouts, as “cascades of un/becoming,” illuminate divergent trajectories. One event in South Australia galvanized new policy commitments and grid-scale batteries, accelerating a more resilient, renewables-based system; the other in Texas laid bare deep structural risks while reinforcing entrenched carbopolitical interests. Drawing on in-depth analyses of engineering reports, social media debates, and community experiences, we highlight how storms themselves become key actants in energopolitics, eliciting new forms of public engagement and political maneuvering. Rather than isolated failures, blackouts operate as charged inflection points, revealing the contradictions of a climate-challenged world and offering surprising opportunities for transformative change.

  PublisherDOI

• Urban Flood Prevention Through Community-Centered Green Stormwater Infrastructure Planning

  Disaster risk reduction · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Social impacts of glacier loss

  Science · 2025-05-29 · 2 citations

  letterSenior author

  More than three-quarters of global glacier mass is projected to disappear under present-day policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Hurricane Milton: Flooded industrial sites and toxic chemical releases are a silent, growing threat

  2024-09-30 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Great EV Road Trip Journal

  Journal of Architectural Education · 2024-07-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Infrastructural citizenship and geosolidarity

  American Ethnologist · 2024-06-19 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In northeast Houston, a community organization is experimenting with building green infrastructure, beginning with rain gardens. In doing so, the project's participants are engaging in what might be called “infrastructural citizenship.” This form of citizenship uses “civil power” to defy white‐supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control, which have made northeast Houston one of the most heavily flooded parts of the city. Yet infrastructural citizenship also expresses commitments beyond stormwater management, taking aim at inherited infrastructural logics and traditions associated with other norms of US petroculture (e.g., spatialized and racialized environmental toxicity, translocal supply chains). In contrast to the default petrosolidarity that ensnares the Global North (and much of the Global South), initiatives like the rain garden project evince a growing geosolidarity with the land and its capacities. Such a politics can challenge both a racist petrostate and the conditions of ecological emergency that it perpetrates.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan Stray

  182 shared

• Aaron M. Williams

  Vanderbilt University Medical Center

  182 shared

• Caelainn Barr

  King's College London

  182 shared

• Ximena S. Villagrán

  São Paulo Museum of Art

  169 shared

• Pınar Dağ

  169 shared

• Aika Rey

  University of California, Berkeley

  169 shared

• María Isabel Magaña

  169 shared

• Raúl Alejandro Luna Sánchez

  Universidad Veracruzana

  169 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2009

• M.A., Anthropology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2004

• B.A., Anthropology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2002

Awards & honors

• Finalist for a 2020 Beazley Design of the Year Award by the…