​"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose that reverberate through planetary problem-solving processes, including public health and environmental crises? This episode brings together two scholars who think elementally: Lisa Yin Han, who operates in the blue humanities or ocean humanities, who studies mediation and the deep seafloor; and Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, who focuses on scientific problems of knowledge and visualization and more specifically, microbes. Their astounding conversation goes from emerging microbes to the seabed to places where their research intersects, including catastrophic deferral, scalar mediation, the figure of the plume, and the concept of resolution.


Lisa Yin Han is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College and author of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies, assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and the Security in the War on Microbes. 


References:
Melody Jue
Celina Osuna, desert humanities
Nicole Starosielski
Christopher P. Heuer / Into the White
Andrea Ballestero
Adriana Petryna / Life Exposed
Celia Lowe
Stefan Helmreich / Alien Ocean
James Hamilton-Paterson / Seven-Tenths


Deepwater Alchemy and Microbial Resolution are available from University of Minnesota Press.



​Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

​Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor

University of Minnesota Press

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Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor