Caela O'Connell

Caela O’Connell is a founding member of the Culture and Disaster Action Network and an environmental anthropologist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She conducts research that considers the complex intersections of agricultural communities, environmental conservation, disasters, economic development, policy, and bananas. She recently began a new project in East Africa and has been working with farming communities in the Caribbean and Latin America and the United States since 2003. This long term ethnographic work is the subject of her upcoming book, Digging Deeper: Why Fairtrade Won’t Realize Sustainability for Agricultural Communities in the Era of Climate Change, which examines the ways climate change compounds ongoing socio-ecological issues of natural resources management, disasters, environmental health, food security, and inequality for agricultural communities.