Join us for a sensory ethnography outing to a campus nanotech lab that specializes in solar electricity (Korgel Lab). Their lab experiments with photovoltaic technology — bringing energy into the realm of human sensation through storage, transduction, and wearable solar electric devices. It is also central to energy futures in the anthropocene.
We will consider how we sense energy, focusing on how energy is transduced from one form to another and what kinds of transduction makes energy sensible. Special attention will be paid to the laboratory as an ethnographic site. You may engage with the site through a variety of media, which we will share following the visit.
Field Trip to Korgel Lab
- When: April 20th. The tour itself is 3-4pm. Please meet in the atrium in front of NHB 6.330 by 2:50pm. After the tour we will head to the Intermedia Workshop for discussion (4-5:30pm).
- Where: NHB 6.330
- Participants should wear long pants and closed-toe shoes during the lab tour for safety reasons.
- Note that the tour is limited to ten participants. Please email Craig [craig.campbell@utexas.edu] to RSVP.
Participants are asked to read the following works in advance of the fieldtrip:
- Myers, Natasha, and Joseph Dumit. 2011. “Haptic Creativity and the Mid-Embodiments of Experimental Life.” A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, 239–61.myers-dumit2011_Haptic_Creativity_and_the_Mid-embodiment
- Recommended:
- Keating, Elizabeth, and Leslie Jarmon. 2006. “What Is Nanotechnology: New Properties of Words as Territories in a Cross-Disciplinary, Cross Border Flow.” Practicing Anthropology 28 (2): 6–10. nanotechnology in society
- Kelty, Christopher. 2008. “Allotropes of Fieldwork in Nanotechnology.” In Emerging Conceptual, Ethical and Policy Issues in Bionanotechnology, 157–180. Springer.kelty2008