RICHARD FADOK

I study the ordinary ways in which design shapes how we know and interact with other living beings. In the midst of epochal concerns around human-made ecologies (often expressed as “the Anthropocene”), my research in cultural anthropology asks how the built environment conditions the possibilities and impossibilities of violence, care, and justice between species.

I pursue this question through fieldwork with designers across the United States. I focus on architects who practice biomimicry and bird-safe design, the subjects of my two ongoing book projects. Combining the anthropology of design and environmental anthropology, specifically multispecies ethnography, I investigate how the things that they make to address climate change and biodiversity loss—material things like windows, buildings, and walls—do not just re-structure relations between humans but also between the human and the nonhuman.