Welcome to Eliot Storer’s department webpage! I am a sociocultural anthropology PhD Candidate at Rice University and currently serve as a predoctoral fellow (2020-1) in the Diluvial Houston Initiative. At Rice I also received a MA (anthropology) in 2016, a Graduate Certificate in Critical and Cultural Theory (3CT), served as a fellow at the Center for Environmental and Energy Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS), and was co-coordinator and (current) collaborator in The Ethnography Studio. I received my BA in ethnic studies and anthropology from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2012, and was a visiting research student at Durham University (UK) in 2017.

As a sociocultural anthropologist my work is critically concerned with the cultural dimensions of contemporary ecological problems, veridical technologies of authority, and the bodily, intersubjective social life of “the everyday.” My field research specifically focuses on Euro-American environmentalist subjectivities, the cultural politics of climate change and scientific field practices, and contemporary theories of spacetime and the environment. My dissertation project, “Environmentalist Spacetimes: An Ethnography of Blanket Bogs in Far North Scotland,” interrogates environmental land use regimes—like ecological restoration—that are being reimagined as national solutions to mitigate climate change. Are these simple solutions or do they over-simplify the problem? This question led me to “stalled” European “geo-engineering” projects, and eventually to the temporally “deep” carbon-rich blanket bogs of Caithness and Sutherland in far north Scotland for long-term ethnographic field research (2017-2018).