I'm an ethnographer, political ecologist, and assistant professor of urban studies at Singapore Management University’s College of Integrative Studies.
My research program explores the spatial and cultural politics of urban climate adaptation, with a geographic focus on the arid US West. Contemporary climate adaptation efforts, particularly those that reroute the movement of water and energy to and through cities, are in the process of reworking urban metabolisms and social relations throughout the world. I study how attempts to make critical infrastructural systems more “climate resilient” transform material flows and urban lives, rearranging labor and power across the extended metropolitan landscape in the process. My multi-scalar research highlights both the intimate and systemic effects of these initiatives, with an emphasis on their environmental justice impacts. My peer-reviewed articles have been published in American Anthropologist, Antipode, City & Society, Critique of Anthropology, Environment and Planning E, Environment and Society, Geography Compass, GeoHumanities, and WIREs Water.
Before joining SMU, I worked as a research scientist with the Urban Water Innovation and Sustainability Hub at Texas A&M AgriLife’s Dallas Center. I also held postdoctoral fellowships at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California. I received my PhD from Yale's combined degree program in Environmental Studies and Anthropology.
I am committed to producing engaged public scholarship, and have written for a wide range of forums including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo Public Square, Metropolitics, and The Awl (RIP). I also served as the lead researcher for dreams of the new world, an interview-based choral work by Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Reid. You can reach me at sprandle at gmail dot com.