Jennifer J Henderson

New Orleans 2019: Conversing

This project is authoethnographic in its representation of a decade long effort of critical participation (Downey 2014) in the U.S. weather prediction community. As a social scientist who study’s up (Gusterson 1997) at key sites of power in weather disasters, I help identify and address issues of urgent concern for those in harm’s way. Some action-oriented researchers have called for studying up because it is an ideal place to generate change in larger systems (Nader 1972, Nygreen 2006). And in STS, the call is to improve the effectiveness and influence of [] scholarship beyond the field and/or to expand the modes of [scholarly] knowledge production (4S 2016). I do both in various ways: I volunteer in meteorology and forecasting organizations, for example, as a Council Member with the American Meteorological Society (AMS); I am a research scientist with interdisciplinary collectives like the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences; and I mentor and teach meteorology students. But exactly how does my STS scholarship travel, how do I retain my STS self, and how can I continue to work in such liminal spaces? A data self visualization will help me refigure these questions.