Natasha Myers
I am an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University and Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory (http://plant-studies.ca)
My ethnographic research examines forms of life in the contemporary arts and sciences. Rendering Life Molecular (Duke University Press, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands? This book won the 2016 Robert K. Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.
With support from an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government and a SSHRC RDI Grant, I convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies.
In new work, I am experimenting with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species relations. One project looks at ways the phenomena of plant sensing and communication are galvanizing inquiry in both the arts and the sciences and propagating new kinds of plant publics. I am tracking how these publics are expanded in sites like botanical gardens and urban parks.
My ethnographic research examines forms of life in the contemporary arts and sciences. Rendering Life Molecular (Duke University Press, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands? This book won the 2016 Robert K. Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.
With support from an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government and a SSHRC RDI Grant, I convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies.
In new work, I am experimenting with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species relations. One project looks at ways the phenomena of plant sensing and communication are galvanizing inquiry in both the arts and the sciences and propagating new kinds of plant publics. I am tracking how these publics are expanded in sites like botanical gardens and urban parks.
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Books by Natasha Myers
Los tiempos largos del evolucionismo, que ponen como sujeto a una especie individual que con sus adaptaciones funcionales se aleja cada vez más de las otras, y los “genes egoístas” del neodarwinismo contemporáneo, que aseguran su supervivencia en el “huésped” mediante una lógica economicista y militar, tienen algo en común. Borran de la escena los cuerpos de los organismos presentes, sus tejidos excitables, sensaciones y placeres, y las prácticas que los hacen impensables sin estar enredados, envueltos, involucrados afectivamente en las vidas de otros, incluso de otras especies.
“Leyendo a contrapelo” la investigación del creador de la teoría de la evolución, la historiadora Carla Hustak y la antropóloga Natasha Myers descubren un Darwin desconocido, obsesionado, fascinado, envuelto sensualmente en el encuentro queer de las orquídeas y las abejas. Apoyándose en las teorías feministas, las plantas, esos seres supuestamente inmóviles y pasivos, aparecen como cuerpos sensoriales creadores de diferencias y proposiciones en un medio cargado de afectos y significancia.
El ímpetu involutivo, que está más cerca del salto de un bailarín que del momentum mecánico y ciego de la física newtoniana, que es el impulso que lleva a los cuerpos a vivir enmarañados y envueltos, pretende sentar las bases para una nueva ecología afectiva.
Editors: Stefan Helmreich, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth and Michael Rossi
(Biogroop) in association with Katrin Klingan und Nick Houde Publisher: Spector Books, Leipzig 165 pages, German and English edition color illustrations, paperback with folded dust cover.
“What is life?” is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Gottfried Treviranus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck independently coined the word “biology” in 1802. The query has titled scores of articles and books, with Erwin Schrödinger’s in 1944 and Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan’s in 1995 being only the most prominent ones. In this book, the editors curate and speculate upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829–2020 containing “What Is Life?” in their titles. Replies to the question – and, by extension, the object of biology – have transformed since its first enunciation, from “the sum of the functions that resist death” to “a bioinformation system” to “edible, lovable, lethal.” Interleaved are frame-shifting interruptions reflecting on how the question has been posed, answered, and may yet be unasked.
With contributions by Evelyn Fox Keller, Stefan Helmreich, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth and Michael Rossi.
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come.
Contributors. Patrick Bresnihan, Tim Choy, Joseph Dumit, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, Joseph Masco, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader, Isabelle Stengers
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Elements: From Cosmology to Episteme and Back / Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers 1
1. Receiving the Gift: Earthly Events, Chemical Invariants, and Elemental Powers / Isabelle Stengers 18
2. Chemicals, Ecology, and Reparative Justice / Dimitris Papadopoulos 34
3. Elementary Forms of Elementary Forms: Old, New, and Wavy / Stefan Helmreich 70
4. Substance as Method: Bromine, for Example / Joseph Dumit 84
5. Elemental Ghosts, Haunted Carbon Imaginaries, and Living Matter at the Edge of Life / Astrid Schrader 108
6. The Artificial World / Joseph Masco 131
7. Tilting at Windmills / Patrick Bresnihan 151
8. Crowding the Elements / Cori Hayden 176
9. Embracing Breakdown: Soil Ecopoethics and the Ambivalences of Remediation / Maria Puig de la Bellcasa 196
10. Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning / Tim Choy 231
11. Reimagining Chemicals, With and Against Technoscience / Michelle Murphy 257
Contributors 280
Index 285
Preface by Vinciane Despret and Maylis de Karanagal.
Abstract: On connaît Darwin comme fondateur de la théorie de l'évolution. Ce que l'on sait moins, c'est que la grande passion de sa vie a été l'étude des orchidées dont il possédait une extraordinaire collection. Il s'est particulièrement intéressé à leur fécondation par des insectes. Sans les guêpes, y aurait-il encore des orchidées ? Ces dernières ont développé des " stratagèmes " pour attirer les guêpes mâles et les séduire. Les guêpes ne se contentent pas de transporter du pollen, elles font littéralement " jouir " les orchidées. Ces travaux viennent compléter la théorie de l'évolution par une théorie de l'" involution ". Les branches de l'arbre de l'évolution viennent se croiser, se mêler. L'orchidée ne peut pas perdurer sans ses liens avec une autre espèce. Loin d'être un cas singulier, ce pourrait être la règle : les arbres et les champignons, les humains et les milliards de bactéries qui les peuplent... Cette nouvelle biologie, initiée par Lynn Margulis, s'oppose au " néodarwinisme ", ou théorie du " gène égoïste ", pour qui la " concurrence ", et non la collaboration ou le lien, est le mécanisme de base. On sait comment cette théorie a essaimé, en particulier dans les sciences économiques, mais aussi en sociologie. La biologie de l'involution multiplie les découvertes. Les auteures poursuivent en présentant les travaux les plus récents sur le langage chimique des plantes, par exemple sur les plants de tabac... Une nouvelle biologie indispensable à l'heure du nouveau régime climatique qui exige que nous connaissions ce à quoi et par quoi nous sommes attachés.
Planthropology by Natasha Myers
FOR PUBLISHED VERSION with citations see: https://www.academia.edu/40441118/How_to_grow_livable_worlds_Ten_not-so-easy_steps_published_version_
FOR EXTENDED VERSION with LINKS see:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548
Los tiempos largos del evolucionismo, que ponen como sujeto a una especie individual que con sus adaptaciones funcionales se aleja cada vez más de las otras, y los “genes egoístas” del neodarwinismo contemporáneo, que aseguran su supervivencia en el “huésped” mediante una lógica economicista y militar, tienen algo en común. Borran de la escena los cuerpos de los organismos presentes, sus tejidos excitables, sensaciones y placeres, y las prácticas que los hacen impensables sin estar enredados, envueltos, involucrados afectivamente en las vidas de otros, incluso de otras especies.
“Leyendo a contrapelo” la investigación del creador de la teoría de la evolución, la historiadora Carla Hustak y la antropóloga Natasha Myers descubren un Darwin desconocido, obsesionado, fascinado, envuelto sensualmente en el encuentro queer de las orquídeas y las abejas. Apoyándose en las teorías feministas, las plantas, esos seres supuestamente inmóviles y pasivos, aparecen como cuerpos sensoriales creadores de diferencias y proposiciones en un medio cargado de afectos y significancia.
El ímpetu involutivo, que está más cerca del salto de un bailarín que del momentum mecánico y ciego de la física newtoniana, que es el impulso que lleva a los cuerpos a vivir enmarañados y envueltos, pretende sentar las bases para una nueva ecología afectiva.
Editors: Stefan Helmreich, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth and Michael Rossi
(Biogroop) in association with Katrin Klingan und Nick Houde Publisher: Spector Books, Leipzig 165 pages, German and English edition color illustrations, paperback with folded dust cover.
“What is life?” is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Gottfried Treviranus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck independently coined the word “biology” in 1802. The query has titled scores of articles and books, with Erwin Schrödinger’s in 1944 and Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan’s in 1995 being only the most prominent ones. In this book, the editors curate and speculate upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829–2020 containing “What Is Life?” in their titles. Replies to the question – and, by extension, the object of biology – have transformed since its first enunciation, from “the sum of the functions that resist death” to “a bioinformation system” to “edible, lovable, lethal.” Interleaved are frame-shifting interruptions reflecting on how the question has been posed, answered, and may yet be unasked.
With contributions by Evelyn Fox Keller, Stefan Helmreich, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth and Michael Rossi.
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come.
Contributors. Patrick Bresnihan, Tim Choy, Joseph Dumit, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, Joseph Masco, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader, Isabelle Stengers
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Elements: From Cosmology to Episteme and Back / Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers 1
1. Receiving the Gift: Earthly Events, Chemical Invariants, and Elemental Powers / Isabelle Stengers 18
2. Chemicals, Ecology, and Reparative Justice / Dimitris Papadopoulos 34
3. Elementary Forms of Elementary Forms: Old, New, and Wavy / Stefan Helmreich 70
4. Substance as Method: Bromine, for Example / Joseph Dumit 84
5. Elemental Ghosts, Haunted Carbon Imaginaries, and Living Matter at the Edge of Life / Astrid Schrader 108
6. The Artificial World / Joseph Masco 131
7. Tilting at Windmills / Patrick Bresnihan 151
8. Crowding the Elements / Cori Hayden 176
9. Embracing Breakdown: Soil Ecopoethics and the Ambivalences of Remediation / Maria Puig de la Bellcasa 196
10. Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning / Tim Choy 231
11. Reimagining Chemicals, With and Against Technoscience / Michelle Murphy 257
Contributors 280
Index 285
Preface by Vinciane Despret and Maylis de Karanagal.
Abstract: On connaît Darwin comme fondateur de la théorie de l'évolution. Ce que l'on sait moins, c'est que la grande passion de sa vie a été l'étude des orchidées dont il possédait une extraordinaire collection. Il s'est particulièrement intéressé à leur fécondation par des insectes. Sans les guêpes, y aurait-il encore des orchidées ? Ces dernières ont développé des " stratagèmes " pour attirer les guêpes mâles et les séduire. Les guêpes ne se contentent pas de transporter du pollen, elles font littéralement " jouir " les orchidées. Ces travaux viennent compléter la théorie de l'évolution par une théorie de l'" involution ". Les branches de l'arbre de l'évolution viennent se croiser, se mêler. L'orchidée ne peut pas perdurer sans ses liens avec une autre espèce. Loin d'être un cas singulier, ce pourrait être la règle : les arbres et les champignons, les humains et les milliards de bactéries qui les peuplent... Cette nouvelle biologie, initiée par Lynn Margulis, s'oppose au " néodarwinisme ", ou théorie du " gène égoïste ", pour qui la " concurrence ", et non la collaboration ou le lien, est le mécanisme de base. On sait comment cette théorie a essaimé, en particulier dans les sciences économiques, mais aussi en sociologie. La biologie de l'involution multiplie les découvertes. Les auteures poursuivent en présentant les travaux les plus récents sur le langage chimique des plantes, par exemple sur les plants de tabac... Une nouvelle biologie indispensable à l'heure du nouveau régime climatique qui exige que nous connaissions ce à quoi et par quoi nous sommes attachés.
FOR PUBLISHED VERSION with citations see: https://www.academia.edu/40441118/How_to_grow_livable_worlds_Ten_not-so-easy_steps_published_version_
FOR EXTENDED VERSION with LINKS see:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548
https://www.huffingtonpost.es/entry/que-se-siente-al-ser-una-planta_es_5e7cc9a4c5b6256a7a2634a8
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/after-the-fires,-are-we-invited-to-moral-community-with-trees/11901494
Read "How to grow livable worlds: 10 not so easy steps for life in the Planthroposcene" here:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548
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.
Fotosíntesis: he aquí la palabra clave que elegiría para esta era que nos obstinamos en llamar «Antropoceno». La fotosíntesis corresponde a una secuencia compleja de procesos electroquímicos. Esos procesos generan gradientes de energía a través de membranas densamente plegadas en los cloroplastos simbióticos de las plantas (Margulis y Sagan, 2000). Los esquemas clásicos de los manuales escolares de nuestros cursos de biología de la preparatoria son representaciones simplistas de ese proceso alquímico, absolutamente mágico y totalmente cósmico, que vincula la vida vegetal terrestre a una forma de atención respetuosa, rítmica, hacia la fuente solar de la tierra. Los seres fotosintéticos-esas criaturas verdes que conocemos con el nombre de «cianobacterias», «algas» y «plantas»-son adoradores del sol y magos terrestres. Bebiendo la luz solar, aspirando el dióxido de carbono, bebiendo el agua y expulsando el oxígeno, las plantas, literalmente, crean el mundo. Transformando el aire impalpable en materia, nos enseñan las lecciones más nas sobre aquello que nos porta y aquello que importa. Lo que son y lo que hacen tiene grandes consecuencias de orden planetario. Decir que la fotosíntesis es una palabra clave para estos tiempos de desastre es un recordatorio crucial de que no estamos solos. Otras potencias, épicas y epocales, están entre nosotros. Los organismos fotosintéticos forman una fuerza biogeoquímica de una magnitud que todavía no hemos comprendido del todo. Hace más de dos mil millones de años, microbios fotosintéticos provocaron el acontecimiento que hoy conocemos con el nombre de catástrofe del oxígeno, o la Gran Oxidación. Esas criaturas alteraron considerablemente la composición de la atmósfera, as xiando a las antiguas bacterias anaeróbicas con vapores tóxicos de oxígeno (Margulis, 1998). Vivimos en la estela de lo que deberíamos llamar el Fitoceno. Los seres verdes hicieron este planeta habitable y respirable tanto para los animales como para nosotros. Prosperamos gracias a la astucia
rendraient enfin grâce aux plantes, ces faiseuses de mondes. Un récit hallucinatoire et quasi mystique qui nous mène aux limites du langage et aux frontières de la perception.
Editor
Colin Coates, Director,
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies,
2011 – 2015, York University
Guest Editors
Jody Berland,
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies,
York University
Jennifer Dalton,
University of Toronto
Managing Editor
Laura Taman, Coordinator,
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies,
York University
Columnists in this issue
Colin Coates
Jody Berland
Margrit Eichler
Dawn R. Bazely
Jennifer Dalton
Denielle Elliott
Karen Murray
Natasha Myers
Callum C.J.Sutherland
Michelle Murphy
Nick J. Mulé
Lina Beatriz Pinto García
Patricia McDermott
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.