About Dean Chahim:

Dean Chahim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at NYU (PhD, Stanford University). An anthropologist by training and previously an environmental engineer, his research and teaching trace the interactions between political power, engineering, and the urban environment—asking both how unjust environmental conditions are produced and sustained through engineering, and how engineering practice might be reconfigured to design for radically different futures. His current book project takes up these questions through the case of Mexico City’s vast and deeply unequal flood control system, showing how engineering becomes a mode not of mitigating but governing disaster. The project has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Prior to NYU, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and was a Fellow in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.