Research Assistant Professor

Affiliations

Department of Earth & Environment

Areas of Expertise

Anthropology of environment; science; infrastructure; Turkey; Europe; Middle East; Mediterranean

View Professor Scaramelli’s CV – January 2023

Website

caterinascaramelli.com

About

Broadly, my research centers on mutual constitutions of ecologies, scientific expertise, and infrastructures as conduits for people’s moral claims about human and non-human livelihoods. I am completing a research project that examines the dynamic multivalence of wetlands. In Turkey, as in many other places, the wetland became an important site of everyday contestations over new and foreclosed possibilities in a time of uncertain politics and in precarious and rapidly changing environments. Wetland conservation has often reinvented and repurposed older tools of swamp reclamation to legitimize technocratic environmental management. At the same time, various social groups have also found in the wetland a fertile yet uncertain, murky, and mobile ground for cultivating new aspirations of democracy, multispecies livelihoods, and more just ecologies. I am also embarking on a new ethnographic research project on ecological precarity and mobility. In this new project, I will examine the cultural and political significance of “heirloom” seeds in the Mediterranean to explore changing experiences of health, precarity, labor, nation, race, and belonging. Read more at: caterinascaramelli.com 

Selected Publications

  • Scaramelli, Caterina. How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021.
  • Scaramelli, Caterina. “Lived Histories of Flows and Sediments in a Turkish Delta.” In Delta Life: Exploring Dynamic Environments Where Rivers
    Meet the Sea, edited by Franz Krause and Mark Harris, 172–97. New York; Oxford: Berghan, 2021.
  • Scaramelli, Caterina. “The Lost Wetlands of Turkey.” MERIP, no. 296 (Fall 2020). https://merip.org/2020/10/the-lost-wetlands-of-turkey/ 

Courses

  • CAS AN 363: Food and Water: Critical Perspectives on Global Crises
  • CAS AN 362: Culture & Environment
  • CAS AN 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  • CAS EE 347: Water Sustainability and the Environment
  • CAS EE 500: The People’s Planet: Science, Environmentalism, and the Global South
  • KHC HC 401: Epistemologies and the Process of Inquiry: The Secret Life of Plants