Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Jiat Hwee Chang, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This talk lays out the consideration of the Pacific as a collision of geopolitical and geophysical scales, processes, and histories, toward an approach to transpacific relation through the encounter of multiple incongruent ‘earthlinesses’. It toggles between earth and multiple altitudes of the sky over the Pacific to inquire into a recent history of Chinese/North American geopolitics through awkward landforms, fluid dynamics, and fallouts. In this, it seeks to characterize the present and future of transpacific relation not as an inevitable march toward a New Cold War, but as a kaleidoscope of earthly permutations, made in it unassimilable encounters between geopolitical and geophysical relations. We consider the long flight patterns of airborne Chinese dust; recent histories of high-altitude surveillance and the takedown of stratospheric spycraft; and North American landforms that evolve with Chinese labor and financial strategy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jerry Chuang-Hwa Zee is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute (Environmental Studies) at Princeton University in the United States. He is the author of Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (University of California Press, 2022), which received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for the Social Studies of Science. His work, at the intersections of science, technology and society, political anthropology, environmental studies, and experimental ethnography, has been published in multiple edited volumes as well as Cultural Anthropology, HAU, American Anthropologist, Scapegoat, Anthropology and Humanism, Made in China, English Language Notes, and Environmental Humanities.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.