Toxic Correspondence: Visualizing the Interstices of Disease and Disaster

As an anthropologist of energy transitions, I am dually committed to investigating and also furthering research on the risks of carbon-based energy infrastructures to justify and direct transitions to clean energy. I am therefore interested in collaborating with experts with diverse visual literacies to develop techniques for representing the dynamic, interscalar processes, difficult temporalities, and complex webs of causality that link the erosion of climate stability with epidemics of public health. By exploring and building upon the work of artists, scholars, and activists already engaged in this work, my goal will be to cultivate a refined capacity to render legible the wide-ranging processual links between what are otherwise assumed to be discrete, apolitical phenomena: “biological” diseases and “natural” disasters. I am particularly interested in tampering with collage and will look for and/or generate images that blend, incorporate, or juxtapose data visualizations with photography and artistic renderings so as to lend the images a sense of what I would like to call Toxic Correspondence.