Dr Hannah Fair

I completed my ESRC-funded PhD in Human Geography at University College London in 2018. In contrast with dominant framings of the Pacific Islands as helplessly vulnerable to sea level rise, I explored alternative discourses of climate change and Oceania that centred Islander agency. I focused on two understudied yet interrelated empirical domains: Indigenous-led Islander climate activism and religious understandings of and responses to climate change. Ethnographically focusing on Vanuatu and the regional activist network 350 Pacific, I drew upon the writing of decolonial scholars such as Epeli Hau’ofa and contemporary theological understandings to uncover locally meaningful and morally compelling counter-narratives of climate change in the Pacific Island region.

Outputs: Fair 2018 ‘Three Stories of Noah‘, Fair 2019 ‘From Apathy to Agency‘, Fair 2020 ‘Their Sea of Islands?‘, Fache and Fair 2020 ‘Turning Away from Wicked Ways‘, and Fair 2022 ‘Playing with the Anthropocene‘.

I was a postdoctoral research associate for the European Research Council-funded ‘Global Lives of the Orangutan‘ project based at Brunel University London (2018-2020). I conducted an ethnography of virtual orangutan ‘adoption’ schemes run mainly by charities in the global North, through which rescue and rehabilitation centres in Borneo and Sumatra obtain financial backing and raise awareness about the plight of orangutan. I examined how notions of kinship, relatedness, intimacy and care are negotiated in this field, and asked how they shape and are shaped by mounting public awareness about extinction, environmental crisis, interspecies ethics and the Anthropocene.

Outputs: Fair et al. 2022 ‘Dodo dilemmas‘; Chua et al. 2021 ‘Only the orangutans get a life jacket‘; Fair 2021 ‘Feeding Extinction‘; Chua et al. 2020 ‘Conservation and the Social Sciences‘; and Chua and Fair 2019 ‘Anthropocene‘.

I am developing a new research project exploring the financial and emotional impacts of living with domestic pest infestations. I investigate what responses to infestation are chosen, by whom, and with what consequences. My work expands debates regarding multispecies flourishing in more-than-human geography, through examining unwanted co-existence with ‘unloved others’, species that are hard to anthropomorphise, and which evoke disgust. I am interested in professional pest control as an undervalued profession and mode of natural history knowledge, and the future of the industry in light of the technical and regulatory challenges it faces. Building on my pilot research, I am in the process of applying for a substantial grant for a larger project ‘Squalid Natures: death, disgust, and expertise in the UK pest control industry’.

I am currently seeking non-academic collaborators in the professional pest control industry. Please let me know if you would be interested in discussing this research further.

Funding:
– Secured £6,000 seed funding from the John Fell Fund for the pilot project ‘Changing Landscapes of Domestic Pest Management’
– Awarded a £300,000 ESRC New Investigators Grant, and a Royal Geographical Society Small Grant for SPIDER (Situating Pests: Impacts, Disgust Expertise and Responsibility)

Presentations:
– Presented at the 2022 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) conference in the ‘Hidden Animals’ session
– Invited seminar speaker for Rice University Texas Centre for Environmental Studies (March 2023)
– Co-organised a session at the 2023 American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) conference in Denver, CO, on ‘Dirt, Labor, Death and the More-than-Human’
– Presented at the 2024 AAG, and co-organised a session at the 2024 RGS on ‘More-than-Human Cartographies’

Journal Articles

Fair, H. and McMullen, M. (2023). Toward a Theory of Nonhuman Species-Being. Environmental Humanities  15 (2): 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422366

Fair, H., Schreer, V., Keil, P., Kiik, L. and Rust, N. (2022) Dodo dilemmas: Conflicting ethical loyalties in conservation social science research. Area 55: 245– 253. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12839

Fair, H. (2022) Playing with the Anthropocene: Board game imaginaries of islands, nature, and empire. Island Studies Journal 17(1): 85-101. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.165

Chua, L., Fair, H., Schreer, V., Stepien, A. and Thung, P.H. (2021) Only the orangutans get a life jacket: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus. American Ethnologist. 48(4): 370-385. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13045

Fair, H. (2021) Feeding extinction: navigating the metonyms and misanthropy of palm oil boycotts. Journal of Political Ecology, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.3001

Chua, L., Harrison, M.E., Fair, H., Milne, S., Palmer, A., Rubis, J., Thung, P., Wich, S., Büscher, B., Cheyne, S.M., Puri, R.K., Schreer, V., Stepien, A. and Meijaard, E. (2020) Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co‐optation. A case study from orangutan conservation. People and Nature 2: 42-60. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10072

Fair, H. (2020) Their Sea of Islands? Pacific Climate Warriors, Oceanic identities and world enlargement. The Contemporary Pacific, 32(2): 341-369. https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2020.0033 (also available here)

Fache, E., Fair, H. & Kempf, W. (Eds.) (2020). Higher Powers: Negotiating Climate Change, Religion and Future in Oceania (edited special issue). Anthropological Forum 30(3).

Fache, E. and Fair, H. (2020) Turning away from wicked ways: Christian climate change politics in the Pacific Island region. Anthropological Forum, 30(3): 233-253. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2020.1811953 (also available here)

Fair, H. (2018) Three stories of Noah: navigating religious climate change narratives in the Pacific Island region. Geo: Geography and Environment, 5(2). e00068. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.68

Book Chapters

Hodgetts, T., and Fair, H. (2024). Animal Geographies. In: Warf, B. (eds) The Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25900-5_203-1

Fair, H. (2019) From apathy to agency: exploring religious responses to climate change in the Pacific Island region. In, Kloeck, C. and Fink, M. (eds.) Dealing with Climate Change on Small Islands: Toward Effective and Sustainable Adaptation. Göttingen University Press, Göttingen. pp. 175-194. https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2019-1216

Chua, L. and Fair, H. (2019) Anthropocene. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch. http://doi.org/10.29164/19anthro

Book Reviews

Fair, H. (2018) Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change. The Journal of Pacific History, 55(3): 342-343. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2018.1481323

I explore speculative fiction and feminist sci-fi as a tool for imagining and exploring possible ecological futures. From 2017-2020 I was the co-ordinator of the Housmans Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, an editor of the Not Afraid of the Ruins creative writing project, and delivered workshops on ‘World-Building Utopia Through Feminist Sci-Fi’ at the London Anarchist Book Fair, Plan C Fast Forward Festival and Shambala Festival.

I’ve also explored the power of creative environmental imaginaries in the context of strategy board games in my piece ‘Playing with the Anthropocene‘.