Dr. David Hughes

Rutgers University

David Hughes earned in PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. Before and during graduate school, he worked on development and conservation projects for NGOs in Zimbabwe, the World Bank, and the government of Mozambique. Since joining the faculty at Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey, Hughes has grappled with the ways in which people exploit each other while exploiting nature, ecosystems, and, indeed, the entire biosphere. He has written two ethnographies of settler colonialism and land reform in Southern Africa: From Enslavement to Environmentalism (University of Washington Press, 2007) and Whiteness in Zimbabwe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Then, Hughes turned his attention energy and the climate crisis in other parts of the world. In Trinidad and Tobago, he carried out ethnography on petroleum geologists, publishing Energy without Conscience (Duke University Press, 2017). Now, he studies renewables and the possibilities for energy democracy. His book on wind power in Spain – Who Owns the Wind? – just came out with Verso Press. As a scholar-activist, Hughes has served as president and chief negotiator of the AAUP-AFT, the faculty labor union. He is currently the union’s climate justice chair and a member of the Climate Justice Task Force of the American Federation of Teachers.