climate and – Misryoum explores how a Columbia Climate School student uses photography and archaeology-informed research to study tourism, knowledge, and climate change beyond the lab.
When Erin Frank took her first steps onto Columbia’s Morningside campus, she didn’t just look around—she documented what she saw, reaching for her camera as if the place itself were part of the evidence.
Frank. a master’s student in the Columbia Climate School’s Climate and Society program. arrived in New York with a conviction that climate change cannot be understood only through measurements and models.. In her view. it is also a story shaped by culture. history. power. and the way different communities decide what counts as knowledge.. That perspective shows up in her daily practice: attention to detail. careful framing. and a willingness to look for what a familiar story might be leaving out.
Her path into this approach is practical, not abstract.. Frank volunteers at the Olo Be Taloha Lab with Kristina Douglass, an archaeologist and associate professor at the Climate School.. In the lab. Frank’s work centers on “knowledge co-production” and environmental knowledge systems—an area of study that challenges the assumption that Western scientific frameworks are automatically universal or complete.. Instead. the research asks how knowledge is built together. whose expertise is prioritized. and how environmental understanding can shift when local ways of seeing are treated as more than background context.
That theme—whose knowledge is foregrounded—connects directly to the project Frank is focused on right now.. She is working on a website of photographs from a recent trip to the Dominican Republic. examining tourism in the Caribbean through multiple lenses. including some that can feel uncomfortable.. Tourism is often discussed in climate conversations in terms of emissions, infrastructure, or vulnerability to extreme weather.. But Frank’s photographic approach pushes the discussion toward something more human: how tourism shapes narratives about places. who benefits from those narratives. and what gets smoothed over in the marketing of “paradise.”
The method matters here.. Photography doesn’t just capture a scene—it captures choices: what is framed. what is cropped out. and what a viewer is nudged to feel.. By making those choices visible, Frank turns images into a conversation about interpretation.. That matters because climate change is rarely received as “only science.” It arrives through stories—about landscapes. livelihoods. and responsibility—passed along by media. tourism. and education.
There’s also a deeper analytical point beneath the aesthetics.. Environmental knowledge systems have long been treated as separate from scientific inquiry, even when they are grounded in lived experience.. When communities develop ways to track seasons. understand risks. or interpret ecosystems over generations. those practices often get categorized as tradition rather than evidence.. Frank’s focus on co-production suggests a different framing: environmental understanding can be strengthened when scientific tools and community knowledge inform one another instead of competing for legitimacy.
For readers, the real-world impact of this kind of work is easier to feel than to measure.. If you’ve ever wondered why climate messaging sometimes fails to land—why certain audiences feel talked at instead of understood—this is one answer.. Climate communication isn’t only about facts.. It’s also about relevance, recognition, and power.. A research approach that asks how knowledge is produced can make climate narratives more accurate and more persuasive. because it takes seriously the communities living with the consequences.
Looking forward. the direction implied by Frank’s project reflects a broader trend in climate research and policy: the move toward interdisciplinarity that doesn’t dilute science but broadens what counts as evidence.. Photography and historical analysis won’t replace climate models.. But they can help clarify the social mechanics that determine whether climate action is seen as necessary, fair, and actionable.. In that sense. Frank’s work is less about substituting culture for science and more about showing how the two constantly intersect—especially in places where the climate story is already entangled with economics and identity.