Medical Humanities: When It All Burns

With Guest Speaker: Jordan Thomas (Author of When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World (2025 National Book Award finalist); PhD candidate in cultural anthropology, UC Santa Barbara Fellow in the Science and Technology Studies Program, Harvard Kennedy School)

This talk draws on frontline experience from California's wildfires to examine the structural factors shaping the health impacts of climate change. Wildfires are now among the United States' deadliest climate disasters, with smoke exposure alone contributing, by conservative estimates, to more than ten thousand deaths each year. Wildland firefighters work, live, and sleep on the edges of these fires for months. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and three years of wildland firefighting experience, I trace the historical, political, and sociocultural factors that shape climate impacts and concentrate them on some people and places with disproportionate violence.

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The Medical Humanities Research Workshop Series is made possible through the support of:

Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures & Languages, Stanford’s Department of Anthropology