Sheehan Moore
Sheehan Moore is a doctoral candidate in anthropology studying environmental crisis and state power on the US Gulf coast. His dissertation research examines responses to land loss in southern Louisiana, with attention to planning, dispossession, extraction, and shifting technologies of land governance. Sheehan was a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Hunter College and has held positions with the Climate Action Lab, the Advanced Research Collaborative, and the New Media Lab. His research is supported in part by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture. He has a BA in anthropology from McGill University.
Collected Work
“Futures on Dry Ground: Anthropology and Coastal Planning”
Around the world, governments, industry, and other actors are creating plans to save coasts from environmental crisis. Louisiana is one prominent example: levees and other measures protect oil and gas infrastructure from inundation as the wetlands buffer rapidly erodes—in large part due to that same industry. This article reviews emerging literature and frames an anthropology of coastal planning around (1) novel orientations toward time and space, (2) the reproduction of power and capital in the name of protection and restoration, and (3) the elision of other forms of land loss and defense by reductive above-ground/underwater planning paradigms.