Halloo! My name’s Beth. I’m an anthropologist. I study how people develop (and use, and argue about, and change) technical systems for disaster mitigation. For the past few years, I’ve been focusing on the oldest public earthquake early warning system in the world: Mexico’s Sistema Alerta Sísmica.
I’m working on my PhD at the University of California at Irvine, but thanks to a bunch of grants I was able to get from bigger and smaller organizations (NSF, American Institute of Physics, Society for the History of Technology, and even some institutes internal the the UC system), I’ve been living in Mexico City for the past year.
Doing this kind of work means I get to know some very cool groups trying to educate and innovate in earthquake safety areas, including Oakland’s Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and Mexico City’s Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico.
You read my longish intro, now here is a cat: