Description:

Join the Buffett Institute's Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group for a public talk by anthropologist and ocean studies scholar Stefan Helmreich (MIT).

Ocean waves of relentless approach have long been objects of apprehension and fear. From marine and maritime folklore, literature and chronicle to dramatic seascape painting, woodcut and collage to representations of colonial slaving shipwreck and the forensics of drowning to Hollywood films, oncoming waves—both outsized and unremitting—have been forces and symbols of nature unbound and social planning unprepared. How do oceanographers and coastal engineers understand waves? In the field, in the laboratory, through mathematics, and in simulation. This talk today centers attention on how ocean waves become, for scientists, objects of measure, monitoring and modeling and in the process, entities whose frightening dimensions might yield to prediction and control. Examples are drawn from A Book of Waves, an anthropological examination of how oceanographers and coastal engineers—mostly in the US and the Netherlands, though also in Australia, Japan and Bangladesh—study waves. The talk centers on how these scientists represent waves as avatars of an oceanic nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. The argument is that wave science, so bound up with prediction, is about time, about orientations toward the future—coastal, environmental, national, political, planetary.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session moderated by Corey Byrnes, co-lead of Shifting Shorelines and Associate Professor of the Environmental Humanities and Chinese Culture (Kaplan Institute, Asian Languages & Cultures, Comparative Literary Studies).

About Stefan Helmreich
Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics and computer science define and theorize their objects of study, particularly as these objects — waves, life, sound, code — reach their conceptual limits. His most recent book, A Book of Waves (Duke University Press, 2023), details how scientists at sea and in the lab monitor and model ocean waves, seeking to capture in technical language these forces of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. The book includes reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist and queer theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history and cosmology. Helmreich’s previous ethnography, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea and oceans outside national sovereignty.

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.