MELODY JUE
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 photo credit: Melody Jue, Fijian coral reef, January 2020 |
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This three-day course will explore how corals help us to understand ocean-specific conditions of mediation in moments of environmental crisis, focusing on their connections to architecture, haptics, and photography. Stony corals have been known as architects and builders of reefs, while soft corals gently inflate with favorable currents. Many are dependent on tropical waters and shallow ecologies of light, which support their symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae). At the same time, coral reefs have been icons for climate collapse, bleached white from intensive ocean warming, and vulnerable to ocean acidification. If what the ocean is depends on the question of for whom, then engaging with corals provides a unique perspective on mediation in the ocean. Readings will explore how each guiding concept—architecture, haptics, and photography—connects with histories of empire, feminist science studies, speculation, and embodied materiality. For example, in what ways have corals figured as models of empire as well as decolonial figures of remediation? Is a coral an individual or collective, and how have artists and theorists tactilely explored this ontological indeterminacy? How does the situation of coral change how we think about photographic processes distributed through the fluid medium of the ocean? What does the climate crisis look like from the perspective(s) of coral(s), and through what mediations? |
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Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working across the fields of ocean humanities, science fiction, science studies, and media theory. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science book award. She is the co-editor with Rafico Ruiz of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke Press, 2021) and co-editor with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee of Informatics of Domination (Duke Press, under contract). Professor Jue has published articles in journals including Grey Room, Configurations, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Resilience, and Media+Environment. Her new work explores the mediations of seaweeds in trans-Pacific contexts. |
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