School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am an anthropologist of development, environment, science & technology. My research explores knowledge practices, environmental perceptions, and decision-making in contexts of social and ecological change. Three key areas of interest are: infrastructure and anticipation; environmental citizenship; and ecologies of knowledge. My projects to date have focused on highway planning and construction; the production and application of weather and climate forecasts; and the negotiation of environmental knowledges in watershed assessments and interventions. I have carried out ethnographic research and interview-based studies in Belize, Kenya and the UK.

I completed my PhD in Anthropology at University College London in 2011. From 2013-19 I was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (University of Oxford), where I held an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant 2017-18 and worked in projects funded by NERC, DfID and the Oxford Martin School. From 2010-12 I worked outside academia as a parliamentary researcher in the UK House of Commons, focusing on health policy among other areas. I sit on the Royal Anthropological Institute Environment Committee, convene the Network for Anthropologies of Forecasting Weather and Climate (AnthFOR), and I'm a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Selected publications

Journal articles

De Wit S & Haines, S. 2022. Climate change reception studies in anthropology, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 13(1):e742

Di Giminiani, P. & Haines, S. 2020 Introduction: Translating environments. Ethnos 85(1):1-16

Haines, S. 2019 Reckoning resources: political lives of anticipation in Belize’s water sector. Science & Technology Studies 30(4):97-118

Haines, S. 2019 Managing expectations: articulating expertise in climate services for agriculture in Belize. Climatic Change 157(1):43-59

Taddei RR & Haines S 2019 When climatologists meet social scientists: ethnographic speculations around interdisciplinary equivocations, Sociologias 21(51):186-209 (simultaneously published in Portuguese)

Haines, S. 2018. Imagining the highway: anticipating infrastructural and environmental change in Belize. Ethnos, 83(2): 392-413

Other publications

Haines, A. & de Wit, S. 2024 Pluralizing climates: from observation and reception to translation and praxis. Journal of Political Ecology Grassroots series: Just and plural political ecologies: traditions and futures.

Haines, S. 2022. Encountering the Climate Regime: “Useful” Climate Knowledge and the Work of Forecasts. Hot Spots, Fieldsights (Society for Cultural Anthropology)

Haines S, Cano A, Hislop A & Williams T 2019. Water: environmental knowledge and rural life in Belize. Report of a multi-stakeholder workshop. Working paper.

Haines, S., Imana, C. A., Opondo, M., Ouma, G. & Rayner, S. 2017. Weather and climate knowledge for water security: Institutional roles and relationships in Turkana. REACH Working Paper 5, University of Oxford.

PhD topics interested in supervising

I am happy to hear from prospective doctoral students interested in pursuing a project related to any of the topics outlined above. Please also see the links below for more information:

• PhD in Social Anthropology
• PhD in International Development