Using the Body to Predict the Future

• In Event: Technoscience, Aesthetics, and the Senses - I

Abstract

The proposed presentation explores how scientific knowledge about climate change explicitly relies upon embodied environmental literacies. Through an analysis of fieldwork by scientific laborers, this talk reveals how the politics of knowledge production are entangled with a politics of labor. Specifically, this talk visually traces sensorial textures of one particular science laborer’s work in the Peruvian Andes, where he climbs dangerous, high-altitude peaks in order to collect chronometric (Barak 2013) data. The data produced through fieldwork provides a constantly updated framework of time left before the worst should arrive: melt. When this future arrives, watersheds will dry up, hydroelectricity that supports much of the country’s infrastructure will vanish, and the region will be constantly under threat from unstable, overfull and over-mineralized meltwater lakes whose instability could kill over 100,000 people. In the broader life of this data, it is eventually used by politicians, NGOs, and scientists to justify a myriad of institutional development and social policies — including the establishment of multimillion dollar climate research centers, as well as educational campaigns and materials designed to ask campesino farmers to take personal responsibility for the production of local atmospheric black carbon through their farming practices by eliminating their seasonal burning. This presentation connects the micro data with macro social processes of adaptation. By analyzing the experiences of scientific labor through ethnographic photography, this talk reveals how processes of climate knowledge production are intertwined with environmental expertise (such as the ability to read terrain, anticipate weather conditions, and sensorially estimate the tensile strength of the ice below).

Author

• Courtney Evelyn Cecale, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)