Research Seminars @ Illinois

Permutable Sky: Stratospheric Photosurveillance and the Geopolitics of the Open Secret

This talk lays out the consideration of the Pacific as a collision of geopolitical and geophysical scales, processes, and histories, toward an approach to transpacific relation through the encounter of multiple incongruent ‘earthlinesses’. It toggles between earth and multiple altitudes of the sky over the Pacific to inquire into a recent history of Chinese/North American geopolitics, investigating the uneven militarization of the upper atmosphere and its entanglement with meteorological sciences. It thinks with the so-called “weather research cover story,” that over a century, has framed aircraft that are likely high-altitude surveillance devices as merely collecting meteorological data. 

This technopolitical entanglement of meteorological and military functions has made the upper atmosphere, from the early Cold War to a recent proliferation of balloon-related activity, a curious site to think about a geopoetics of transpacific relation, in which geopolitical and geophysical considerations re-stage one another to generate unexpected forms of implausible deniability that both stunt diplomacy and also allow it to continue.