O’Reilly is an environmental anthropologist who studies how scientists and policymakers participate in environmental management, both in regards to the Antarctic environment and global climate change. Through participant observation and ethnographic interviews, she examines how people and ideas in science and policy interact, how experts make decisions about matters of concern, and how relationships with the environment inform knowledge production. O’Reilly’s conducted research in Antarctica, New Zealand, at the Antarctic Treaty consultative meetings and at meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Her current project analyzes how assessors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make decisions in the writing of their assessment reports, which form the core set of science advice to the UNFCCC. Much of this work is represented in her new book “The Technocratic Antarctic: an Ethnography of Scientific Expertise and Environmental Governance.”
