Ian Patrick Gray

Ian Gray is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses broadly on how environmental problems become economic problems. In particular, he is interested in how scientific knowledge about environmental change is apprehended, repurposed, and made “actionable” by commercial and economic actors. In his dissertation, he is looking at how efforts to calculate the physical impacts and costs of climate change are reconfiguring institutional relations in various administrative and economic sectors such as catastrophe insurance, public water management, and agricultural development. His analysis relies on blending approaches from STS, economic sociology, and organizational studies.

From 2012–2015, Gray held the position of Research Fellow at the médialab of Sciences Po (Paris), where he managed a National Research Agency-funded project on the international politics of climate change adaptation. He holds a Masters in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and graduated from Brown University with a BA in modern European intellectual history.