Cody Skahan

Anthropology (2024 cohort)

The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the global average, melting Arctic Sea ice at an alarming rate. To “refreeze the Arctic” before reaching critical tipping points that would cause irreversible effects to the global climatic system, a Finnish group of youth environmental activists formed the organization Operaatio Arktis (OA) focused on the controversial theme of geoengineering. Given Finland’s position within the Arctic, these activists are driven by not only an abstract fear of a foreshortened future, but a very concrete and immediate fear of losing their homes. Their advocacy for research into geoengineering seeks to prevent their worst fears by hedging their bets against the slow pace of Greenhouse Gas emissions reduction and carbon removal technologies. Even by simply suggesting further research into geoengineering, OA has divided scientists and activists alike due to the latter’s fears over the unpredictable impacts of geoengineering or potential for crowding out other forms of climate action and the colonial legacy of past geoengineering experiments that ignored the agency of indigenous groups. My research will involve ethnographic fieldwork with OA on their attempts to balance competing notions of justice and sociotechnical imaginaries—defined as “...collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology”—in the geoengineering “debate” , and bring to life their youth friendly visions of the future (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 3). An additional element of my proposed project involves producing a series of experimental ethnographic film shorts that bring to life the sociotechnical imaginaries possessed by my interlocutors.

Cody Skahan is a graduate of the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow and DPhil student at the University of Oxford. His work focuses on youth environmentalism in the Arctic, conflicting and interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries around geoengineering (the subject of his DPhil research), and the use of theory for public communication and social change. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures available wherever you get podcasts.