Akshita Sivakumar, University of California at San Diego
New Orleans 2019: Imagining
This project asks: How do we model and control dust? In its various entanglements, dust, as a scientific and non-scientific (non)object, is material but evades measure, and is governed through metaphor, myth, and model alike. This making and doing presentation will be based on a scholarly picture book I’m currently working on. It is illustrated as a children’s book and foot-noted as a scholarly one. It follows a little boy and his companion vacuum cleaner who ask questions of dust. This narrative of imagined engagements brings together voices from interdisciplinary networks, to whom dust has come to matter while laying the stakes of indeterminacy.
How and why do we model and control dust? In its various entanglements, dust, as a scientific and non-scientific thing, is material but evades measure, and is governed through metaphor, myth, and model alike. Through this presentation I present two things: 1. A suite of epistemic objects through which we have made sense of dust 2. A method of setting up research questions through the medium of a (scholarly) picture book. The picture book follows a little boy and his companion vacuum cleaner who ask questions of dust. This narrative of imagined engagements brings together voices from interdisciplinary networks of actors to whom dust has come to matter, while laying out the stakes of indeterminacy and unequal knowledge regimes. It puts two such knowledge regimes in conversation to ask : who do we listen to and who have we silenced in our attunements to dust?