& Inequality
Kerry Ryan Chance's research investigates how climate change and environmental stress are mediated through urban infrastructures. Her work focuses on inequality, governance, and everyday life in contexts shaped by pollution, energy systems, and ecological transformation.
Research Areas
Urban Ecology & Infrastructure
Examination of how urban environments are shaped through material systems such as housing, water, and energy, and how these systems structure social and political life.
Energy and Pollution
Analysis of energy production and circulation, with particular attention to the unequal distribution of environmental harms, including air pollution across petrochemical landscapes.
Climate Change & Inequality
Study of how climate change intensifies existing social inequalities and produces new forms of vulnerability, displacement, and political response at the community level.
Political Anthropology of Environment
Focus on governance, activism, and everyday practices through which environmental conditions are contested, negotiated, and made legible to communities and institutions.
The Habitable Air Project
The Habitable Air Project is a multi-sited research initiative that examines climate change from the perspective of unequal exposure to air pollution across interconnected energy hubs. The project brings together qualitative research, environmental monitoring, and policy engagement.
The project contributes to interdisciplinary approaches to climate research by foregrounding community-level experiences and the social dimensions of environmental data.
Field Sites
Long-term ethnographic fieldwork in urban shacklands and petrochemical corridors, examining the politics of housing, eviction, and unequal exposure to industrial air pollution.
Research into community-level experiences of air pollution in US energy infrastructure zones, focusing on environmental governance, monitoring, and climate vulnerability.
Archival work connecting South African, American, and German historical records to illuminate how the past shapes present environmental and geopolitical conditions — and how these entangled histories may inform future developments.
Research Methods
Ethnographic Fieldwork
Long-term immersive research in communities experiencing environmental harm and infrastructural precarity.
Environmental Monitoring
Community-based air quality monitoring and interdisciplinary collaboration with environmental scientists.
Policy Engagement
Translation of research findings into policy briefs for UN and international environmental governance bodies.