Laboratory of Performance

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Laboratory of Performance

April 2, 2012 by Samantha Catalyst

Wednesdays at ERG…

Wednesdays at the Energy and Resources Group (ERG), UC Berkeley, start early. At 8AM, we attend Climate Lab, taking place in the Neville G.W. Cook Room, and organized by PhD Candidate, Stacy Jackson. These weekly meetings provide opportunities for in-house discussions about climate change.

The talks are casual and range from the technical to the anthropological. As an anthropologist at ERG, you can find yourself at the nexus of always conducting research and ethnography simultaneously.

The technical here refers to economic projections and computer modeling that seek to establish the evidence so that we can collectively begin to emancipate the earth from laboring under the conditions of capital.

Everyone is concerned with greenhouse gas emissions, lowering the carbon footprint, behavioral change, moving toward lower carbon lifestyles. There is no question that the earth is warming, it is just a matter of whether the evidence can bring about certain political, technical and social ends.

On one such a Wednesday, I presented Empathy for the Graph, to discuss how time horizons that ERGies work with, become available through complicated non-representational images (graphs, charts, equations). These images remain a valid depiction of events, but are often ungraspable to most persons outside the confines of Neville G.W. Cook Room itself. Though in fact, there is some evidence, that various groups across the United States are becoming increasingly comfortable with non-representational images, and intensifying, in fact, a sense of unease among those for whom such images still remain standards of their inability to comprehend.

Well to continue. After Climate Lab, which takes place from 8AM to 9AM, everyone goes back to what they were doing. There is typically another talk at noon. A few folks from the Goldman School of Public Policy announce a seminar lecture, so we head over there, as we did recently, to hear from Jan-Erik Petersen, seen here, talking from the position of the European Environmental Agency about science and policy making for the environment in Europe.

But whatever the talk, we all typically return again at 1:30PM back into the same room where Emeritus Gene Rochlin presides over the PhD Seminar. Gene is a nuclear physicist with a political science background and leader in Science and Technology Studies.

By the way, ERG’s Dick Norgaard has a new edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (2011) which he co-edited with John Dryzek and David Schlosberg. It is fabulous and expensive, still in hardback, but your library probably has a copy.

Dick presented recently in the lunch time seminar, and then, as if by chance, I was able to see an encore performance of that talk, much improved, in London at King’s College.
Certainly, I have presented at the lunch time talk as well, also in preparation for different venues. As such, the Neville Room is a laboratory for the constitution and staging of performative knowledge elsewhere.