Writing and Teaching on Shaping the Future

An anthropologist and filmmaker who is working on his third book, Peter Sutoris (Slovakia, UWC Atlantic, Dartmouth ’11 5) is an assistant professor in climate and development at the Sustainability Research Institute of the University of Leeds in the UK.

“I try to get my students to think about our world’s shared future not as something that’s predetermined,” he writes, “but to open them up to different possibilities and activate their moral imagination and political agency, so that they don’t think of themselves as cogs in a machine but rather think about what the machine is doing.”

Peter’s volunteer experience as an undergraduate, teaching high-school history in the Marshall Islands, led to his 2012 documentary film, The Undiscovered Country, about the challenges that the island nation faces in pursuing development. His Dartmouth honors thesis on development filmmaking gave rise to his first book, Visions of Development (Oxford University Press, 2016). His second is Educating for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2022), on how education can be refocused for today’s environmental crisis.

He’s currently co-writing Development Reimagined, a book that, Peter writes, “looks at ways international development might be rethought in the face of the global challenges faced by the world.” His writing has also appeared in Scientific American, Mother Jones, Politico, Salon, and The Guardian.

“The environmental crisis is not a crisis of technology or science, it is a crisis of imagination,” he wrote in Scientific American. “Cultivating imagination means learning from history’s disrupters who made the allegedly impossible palatable.”

This profile is part of the “Graduates in Action” series from the 2024 Annual Report.