RCCS is co-sponsoring this talk hosted by the Department of Geography.
Abstract
This talk explores how the stratosphere has taken shape as a front in the shifting geopolitics of China, Taiwan, and the United States. Thinking oceanic relation from the high atmosphere, we trace a history of spyplanes, balloons, cover stories, and clouds to investigate how the gray zones between meteorological research and reconnaissance spycraft continuously throw the sky into permutations of the geopolitical and the geophysical. From early US overflights over the Taiwan Straits and secret missions over mainland China in the Cold War, and the various ways that Sino-Taiwanese-American relations have coalesced around balloons that alternately appear to collect weather and intelligence data, we ask how top secrecy in the sky takes form through subtle and increasingly incredible performances of state public-ness.
Bio
Jerry Zee is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. He’s published in multiple edited volumes as well as Cultural Anthropology, HAU, American Anthropologist, Made in China, Anthropology and Humanism, Environmental Humanities, English Language Notes, and The Black Warrior Review. His book, Continent in Dust, received honorable mention for the Ludwik Fleck Prize at the Society for the Social Studies of Science.