School of Social and Political Science

Background

Sophie Haines is an anthropologist of development, environment, science & technology. Her 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. 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. She has carried out ethnographic research and interview-based studies in Belize, Kenya and the UK.

Sophie completed her PhD in Anthropology at University College London in 2011. From 2013-19 she was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (University of Oxford), where she 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 she worked as a parliamentary researcher in the UK House of Commons, focusing on health policy among other areas. She sits on the Royal Anthropological Institute Environment Committee, and convenes the Network for Anthropologies of Forecasting Weather and Climate (AnthFOR).

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, 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 not currently taking on any new PhD supervisions.