CoSEP
COLLECTIVE for SOCIO-SPATIAL
& ENVIRONMENTAL PRAXIS
UC DAVIS
RESEARCH TRACKS AND THEMES
ABOUT
Established in Dec 2023, CoSEP undertakes transdisciplinary,
research-driven projects to address the socio-spatial and political nature of designing and governing the built environment to facilitate the fullness of life. CoSEP's projects lie at the intersection of design, technology, governance, and social justice. We are committed to praxis, or the reflective manner of combining theory and practice to achieve and sustain just futures. CoSEP is housed at the University of California, Davis, on the land of the home of the Patwin people.
© Akshita Sivakumar 2023 - 2024
RESEARCH TRACK: Technoscience of Environmental Governance
THEME #2: Technologies of Accountability and Solidarity
ii. Sounding Particulate Matter
How and why do we model and control dust? In its various entanglements, dust, as a scientific and non-scientific phenomenon, is material but evades measure and is governed through metaphor, myth, and model alike. Through this exhibit, I do two things: 1. Present a suite of epistemic objects used in various scientific and cultural discourses to make sense of dust, and 2. Develop a method of setting up research questions through the medium of a scholarly picture book and exhibit. In the book, a narrative of engagements brings together voices from interdisciplinary networks of actors to whom dust has come to matter while laying the stakes of indeterminacy and unequal knowledge regimes. In the exhibit, I prioritize the sounds of dust through oral histories and listening practices rather than visual representations to further articulate entanglements with dust.
The exhibit consists of 8 dust globes that shift the traditional gaze of viewing objects in snow-globes to instead examine social and cultural meaning attached to practices through the aural modality, while the visual becomes subordinate. Each of the globes voices decenter objective science to instead center oral histories, stories from indigenous ontologies and marginalized voices, and voices during times of crisis. I put these various knowledge regimes in conversation to ask: To whom do we listen and who have we silenced in our attunements to dust?
MAKING AND DOING AWARD