About

Cymene Howe is an Associate Chair and Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. Her research focuses on anthropogenic climate change and its implications for collective futures, with a particular interest in the intersections of feminist and queer theories, new materialisms, and more-than-human beings. Howe has conducted field research in Iceland, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States, and her current work examines the social life of ice in the Arctic and its transformation into sea level rise in coastal cities. Her MELT project in Iceland explores the social significance of ice and cryohuman relations, while her subsequent MELT//RISE project develops a comparative analysis of adaptation strategies in the Arctic and resilience techniques in coastal cities facing sea level rise, utilizing NASA climate models to trace water movement from melting ice to sea level rise. Howe is the author of the book 'Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene,' which investigates the political and social contingencies of renewable energy development, emphasizing the articulation of energetic desires and their ecological impacts. She contributed to 'The Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon,' a collection of multidisciplinary essays on unexpected keywords related to the Anthropocene, and is working on a volume titled 'Solarities: Being in the Time of Sun.' Howe also co-edits 'The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory.' Her first book, 'Intimate Activism,' analyzes how sexual rights activists in Nicaragua reframe revolutionary history to create new models of sexual subjectivity and rights. She has served as an expert witness in sexual asylum cases in the United States. Howe teaches courses on topics including environmental and energy issues, activism, ontologies, sexuality, and anthropological methods, contributing significantly to the academic discourse on climate, energy, and social justice.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• History
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Environmental ethics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Ecology
• Political economy
• Psychology
• Astrobiology
• Law
• Cognitive science
• Aesthetics
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Elemental Ethnography: A Proposition

  American Anthropologist · 2026-04-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The elements are all around us, all the time. They create our context in the disposition of weather. But they also compose us, giving us our bodily form through structures such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Elements are also, historically and into the present, objects and processes that comprise and transform the world: earth and wood, air and water, fire and ether, space and metal, cloud and fog. Given all that the elements are, all that they make, and all that they make possible, this essay asks: What might an elemental ethnography offer to us?

  PublisherDOI

• On Dying Glaciers

  2026-02-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Iceland’s glaciers have long been a key feature of the country’s landscape, captured in its appellation “the land of fire and ice.” In this chapter, readers are introduced not only to the retreat of glaciers due to climate change, but to their total disappearance or “death,” and, importantly, how we can respond, through cultural forms such as ritual, to these threshold events in our global environment. This chapter discusses the author’s creation of the Okjökull memorial event in Iceland, the shooting of polar bears, and the nostalgia for formerly dangerous earth forms (glaciers) that are now themselves endangered. Using Haraway’s notion of “response-ability,” it argues for new kinds of attention and engagement with the natural world, with a focus on socioenvironmental mutuality.

  PublisherDOI

• Melting glaciers as symbols of tourism paradoxes

  Nature Climate Change · 2026-02-01 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Tracking extinct glaciers in GLIMS

  Annals of Glaciology · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS), an initiative to build and distribute a database of global glacier data, has recently begun to track glaciers that have recently disappeared. GLIMS provides a definition of “extinct” glaciers for our community, and the final determination of extinction is left to local experts. There are currently 181 glaciers in the GLIMS Glacier Database that are marked as “extinct”, though we recognize that there have been many more reported in the literature. GLIMS welcomes more submissions to make the list more complete.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Energy

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-11-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Social impacts of glacier loss

  Science · 2025-05-29 · 2 citations

  letter1st authorCorresponding

  More than three-quarters of global glacier mass is projected to disappear under present-day policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Impact in the energy social sciences and humanities: <i>How</i>  we matter matters

  Geo Geography and Environment · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Recent developments in energy social science and humanities (SSH) research raise two questions that this Dialogue jointly addresses. How do these fields of enquiry matter? And relatedly, how can we engage across our scholarly praxes and differences to complement and bolster the strengths of each field? These fields include energy anthropology, energy geography, energy science and technology studies, and energy humanities more broadly. We argue that these sub‐fields need to interact across their disciplinary homes. Their family resemblances are important to capitalise upon alongside their individual strengths. Within their energy‐related sub‐fields, we argue that these disciplines can channel mutual engagement towards wider impact. To explain how these sub‐fields matter, we articulate what we refer to as impact in energy SSH. We channel our individual vantage points into dialogue within a thematic structure along the lines of how power, justice and politics matter in relation to energy SSH and then offer a synthesis conclusion to argue that for impact in energy SSH, how we matter matters. We take a long view of the importance of energy SSH, attentive to the relevance of the conditions of production for praxis. We argue for bringing energy SSH closer into the folds of disciplinary practice while retaining emphasis on the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration it necessitates (for scholars to make sense of changes in energy systems with all the institutional, sociotechnical, cultural and indeed political complexity these transitions entail) for more engaged and informed energy SSH. Working in close engagement with the exciting, frightening and intellectually fascinating forces shaping the world at the present conjuncture as society faces transformative imperatives is the key to retaining relevance, reinvigorating disciplinary praxes and enabling impactful energy SSH.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Afterword: Kill the petrostate

  Critique of Anthropology · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Afterword to “Contesting Transitions” special issue, eds. Mark Goodale and Zeynep Oguz.

  PublisherDOI

• Unsettling extractivism: Indigeneity, race, and disruptive emplacements

  The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology · 2024-08-20 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Drawing inspiration from new work across the fields of political ecology, plantation and abolition studies, critical Indigenous studies, and racial capitalism, this Introduction to a special issue of The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology locates extraction within an account of property as a system of racialized exploitation. Aware of the risks of a cosmopolitics that romanticizes non‐Western value systems as largely untouched by extractivism, in this Introduction and in the articles themselves, we center the question of how Indigenous communities and others navigate extractivism in places and landscapes that have been deeply impacted and partly transformed by resource mining, agrarian monoculture, and deforestation. In voicing demands not subordinated by a materialist and secular language of resource exploitation, these accounts invite a less deterministic account of “our” late capitalist present. We contend that just as extraction is not monolithic, neither are its refusals, resistances, and alternatives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Okjökull Memorial and Geohuman Relations

  Social Anthropology · 2024-03-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors’ ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their ‘passing’ or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet. Résumé En se concentrant sur la vie et la mort d'Okjökull, le premier des principaux glaciers islandais à disparaître en raison des changements climatiques anthropogéniques, cet article discute les relations complexes entre la cryosphère et les communautés humaines en Islande. Il questionne la manière dont les distinctions entre entités non vivantes et êtres vivants peuvent offrir des perspectives à l'anthropologie et la transdisciplinarité en tant que modèle pour reconnaitre des précarités mutuelles entre monde vivant et non vivant en face du changement climatique anthropogénique. En détaillant la rencontre ethnographique entre les auteurs, la montagne Ok et l'Okjökull (le glacier), les auteurs défendent l'idée qu'en prenant acte des formes non vivantes et en marquant leur « disparition » ou leur perte, nous sommes en mesure de documenter et de mieux comprendre les événements de bascule dans la vie de notre planète.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• The Political Culture of Wind Power Development in Southern Mexico

  NSF · $148k · 2011–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Dominic Boyer

  Rice University

  35 shared

• Andrea Ballestero

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  18 shared

• Una Chaudhuri

  University of Rochester

  17 shared

• Debbora Battaglia

  17 shared

• Laura Watts

  Pacific Standard

  17 shared

• Ashley Carse

  Vanderbilt University

  17 shared

• Steph Jordan

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Reade Davis

  University of Rochester

  16 shared