Natasha Myers

What follows are excerpts from a project I am calling Rooting into the Planthroposcene. Taking the impossible and nearly comedic form of a step by step guide to getting out of the Anthropocene, this project picks up recent calls for inventive forms of speculative fabulation. This form does well to channel both my rage about our current predicament, and my playful and loving, if also serious aspirations for dreaming worlds otherwise. Just to prepare you for what will follow: this is not so much a research paper, as an incantation. We have to remember that we are living under a spell, and this spell making it impossible for our more than human worlds to flourish. It’s time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world.  It is clear that we are at the limits of language, at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment, and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel, and know.

In the photo essay that follows, I share some field notes two years into a long-term research-creation collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona. Becoming Sensor mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise. Part of a long-term ethnographic research project on an urban park in Toronto, Becoming Sensor speculates on protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. In this project, Ayelen and I engage the expansive mediations of art and the artful attentions of ethnography to remake the naturalist's notebook. This more-than-natural history of an oak savannah in Toronto's High Park offers one approach to cultivating a robust mode of knowing grounded in queer, feminist, decolonial politics.

http://becomingsensor.com

The aim of this project is to interrogate the self-evidence of approaches to conservation ecology and environmental monitoring by throwing open the very question of what it means to pay attention to all these beings who have been paying attention for so many millennia. Working at the cusp of art, anthropology, and ecology, this research-creation project cultivates a queer, feminist, political ecology of an urban park that reimagines the techniques and practices of ecology beyond the normative, moralizing, economizing discourses that ground conventional scientific approaches. The aim is to experiment with sensory practices that can document the growth, decay, combustion and decomposition that are essential to the life of this remarkable land. This “ungrid-able ecology” reconfigures the naturalist’s notebook by innovating techniques for tuning into the affectively charged spaces of encounter and the “involutionary momentum” that propels plants, insects, animals, and people to involve themselves together in this ongoing naturalcultural happening.

Episode 5: Science and Medicine, Pt. 2
April 7, 2016Episodes

Our guiding question in Episode 1 was: How scientific is the practice of medicine?  In this deeper dive of a follow-up effort, we’re pursuing a different and more radical question: Just how scientific is the practice of science?

Natasha Myers, author of Rendering Life Molecular, from Duke University Press, discusses her study of protein crystalographers at work, and particularly the ways in which their bodies and their emotions — not simply their rational minds — are involved in their scientific knowledge of their subject matter. Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock, with the University of Chicago Press, takes us through the history, the theoretical arguments, and the defining problems of modern life science since Descartes, with a particular eye toward the way that the competitions between models of how to understand living things — are they passively mechanical matter? Suffused with an inner force? Fundamentally immaterial in nature? — actually played out.  Spoiler:  Triumphant models weren’t necessarily victorious because of being closer to something like the truth.

After reading Natasha Myers’s new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. "Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms of life and what materialities are coming to matter in the twenty-first-century life sciences," according to Myers, and the book bears out this statement. Those forms of life and materialities emerge from kinesthetic and affective entanglements created and navigated by the scientists in the course of their modeling work. Understanding that work – in part thanks to a thoughtful exploration of the notion of "rendering" that unfolds over the course of the book – helps us understand the ways that scientific knowledge is fundamentally embodied and gestural, and refigures scientific cultures as performance cultures. This is an exciting, inspiring book that is simultaneously a careful study of a particular local scientific culture, and a model for how to re-enchant our knowledge of the living world.

The development and use of models as research tools to understand the world continues to fascinate scholars in science and technology studies (STS), and particularly those interested in the dynamics of scientific knowledge production and related scholarship in the history and philosophy of science (HPS). Models are ubiquitous in scientific practice, and yet their sheer diversity of forms and roles dazzles anyone attempting to analyze their epistemic significance and social roles. Moreover, while philosophers have published countless studies of the criteria used by scientists to develop and select models as representations of objects and processes in the world (Frigg and Hartmann 2012), what makes a model or a modeling activity successful among researchers—what makes its results convincing , its use fruitful, and its manipulation satisfying—remains shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the most cryptic aspect of modeling work is its concreteness, which becomes evident when considering cases of scientists working with material objects such as scale models, diagrams and physical reconstructions of particular ways of conceptualizing a given phenomenon, like the famous ball-and-sticks three-dimensional model of the triple helix used by James Watson and Francis Crick to explore the structure of DNA. Natasha Myers has devoted over a decade to studying the ways in which biologists act, think and move with and around material models, and Rendering Life Molecular is a wonderful account of the insights acquired through her research and relentless desire and ability to push the boundaries of contemporary STS scholarship. The book convincingly argues for what Stengers (2010) has called ''reciprocal rendering'' between researchers and their objects: In this case, the extent to which biologists are conditioned to respond to and think with the molecules, and related