Dean Chahim
About Dean Chahim
I am currently a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University, where I am also affiliated with the Metropolis Project in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Starting in Fall 2022, I will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. I received my PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Prior to my doctoral work, I trained and worked professionally as an environmental engineer. My research examines how unjust environmental conditions are produced and sustained through engineering practices, and how they might be made otherwise. My current project, Draining the Infinite Metropolis: Engineering and the Banality of Disaster in Mexico City, is an ethnography and history of flood control engineering in modern Mexico City. It reveals why and how Mexico City continues to flood because - not in spite - of having one of the world's largest urban drainage systems, and how engineering has become a mode of governing disaster in the Anthropocene. I am currently developing a new project focused on climate change, speed, and the politics of transportation engineering in Mexico City.