​Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor

​"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. 

Episode 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.