Vital Perspectives Series: Stefan Helmreich with Nicole Labruto

Description

Stefan Helmreich, professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be in conversation with Nicole Labruto, assistant research professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Anthropology, on his book A Book of Waves as part of the Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science series. This series engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book.

Join this evening of scholarship made accessible, opening conversation around this truly innovative monography. In A Book of Waves, Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet.

Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the U.S., Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves' materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wakes and breaks of social histories and futures.

Helmreich is also the author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, and Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.

Hosted by the Johns Hopkins Medicine, Science, and the Humanities major.