Natasha Myers
Biographic Data
| ID | 3653780 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Natasha Myers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Natasha |
| FAMILY NAME | Myers |
| SIGNATURE | MYERS N |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 449 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Stories are seeds. We need to learn how to sow other stories about plants
In this interview, Natasha Myers discusses her understanding of plants and the relational stories they tell. As a scholar, activist, and artist based in Toronto, Canada, Myers proposes ways to detune Western norms and forms of sense-making, to expand our sensorium, and participate with plants in the stories they tell. Calling out the colonial violence, racial injustice, and neo-Darwinism that are lurking within the stories people still tell about…
Introduction. Elements
Elements
Reactivating Elements
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineeri…
Anthropologist as Transducer in a Field of Affects
Knowings and Knots
From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens against Eden
Ungrid-able Ecologies
In the photo essay that follows, I share some field notes two years into a long-term research-creation collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona. Becoming Sensor mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise. Part of a long-term ethnographic research project on an urban park in Toronto, Becoming Sensor speculates on protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural h…
From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene
Debbora Battaglia’s essay opens portals to entire worlds that turn around plants, sites in which people and their attendant techniques, technologies, and magic get caught in the spiralling whorl of
Rendering Life Molecular
The politics of care in technoscience
Care is a slippery word. Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks impor…
Dance Your PhD
In 2008 Science Magazine and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science hosted the first ever Dance Your PhD Contest in Vienna, Austria. Calls for submission to the second, third, and fourth annual Dance Your PhD contests followed suit, attracting hundreds of entries and featuring scientists based in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the UK. These contests have drawn significant media attention. While much of the commentary has focus…
Involutionary Momentum
This essay puts forth a theory of "affective ecologies" encompassing plant, animal, and human interactions. The authors' formulation of "involution" favors a coevolution of organisms that act not on competitive pressures but on affective relations. Drawing in particular from-and challenging-Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of orchid-insect contact and controversial research on plant communication, Hustak and Myers demonstrate the interdepende…
Pedagogy and Performativity
A recently released documentary on life in a protein crystallography laboratory offers an exemplary opportunity to examine how a popular account of scientific training models narrowly defined norms of masculinity and mentorship and simultaneously sets these as the tacit conditions for success in science. Rather than treating this documentary as a good or bad representation of what life in the lab is actually like, this analysis draws attention to…
Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography
Protein molecules, those objects of increasing interest and investment in post-genomics research, are complex, three-dimensional structures made up of thousands of atoms. Protein crystallographers build atomic-resolution models of proteins using the techniques of X-ray diffraction. This ethnographic study of protein crystallography shows that becoming an expert crystallographer, and so making sense of such intricate objects, requires researchers …
Animating Mechanism
In the scientific literature, proteins are frequently figured as molecular machines; that is, as tiny mechanisms that operate in interlocking assemblages, and which act to build and maintain the body as a higher-order machine. Mechanical models parse living bodies in ways that seem, at first glance, to deaden lively processes. I build on feminist contributions to the science studies literature to show how, rather than spelling the “death of natur…
The politics of care in technoscience
Care is a slippery word. Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks impor…
From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene
Debbora Battaglia’s essay opens portals to entire worlds that turn around plants, sites in which people and their attendant techniques, technologies, and magic get caught in the spiralling whorl of
Involutionary Momentum
This essay puts forth a theory of "affective ecologies" encompassing plant, animal, and human interactions. The authors' formulation of "involution" favors a coevolution of organisms that act not on competitive pressures but on affective relations. Drawing in particular from-and challenging-Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of orchid-insect contact and controversial research on plant communication, Hustak and Myers demonstrate the interdepende…
Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography
Protein molecules, those objects of increasing interest and investment in post-genomics research, are complex, three-dimensional structures made up of thousands of atoms. Protein crystallographers build atomic-resolution models of proteins using the techniques of X-ray diffraction. This ethnographic study of protein crystallography shows that becoming an expert crystallographer, and so making sense of such intricate objects, requires researchers …
Dance Your PhD
In 2008 Science Magazine and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science hosted the first ever Dance Your PhD Contest in Vienna, Austria. Calls for submission to the second, third, and fourth annual Dance Your PhD contests followed suit, attracting hundreds of entries and featuring scientists based in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the UK. These contests have drawn significant media attention. While much of the commentary has focus…
Reactivating Elements
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineeri…
Pedagogy and Performativity
A recently released documentary on life in a protein crystallography laboratory offers an exemplary opportunity to examine how a popular account of scientific training models narrowly defined norms of masculinity and mentorship and simultaneously sets these as the tacit conditions for success in science. Rather than treating this documentary as a good or bad representation of what life in the lab is actually like, this analysis draws attention to…
Animating Mechanism
In the scientific literature, proteins are frequently figured as molecular machines; that is, as tiny mechanisms that operate in interlocking assemblages, and which act to build and maintain the body as a higher-order machine. Mechanical models parse living bodies in ways that seem, at first glance, to deaden lively processes. I build on feminist contributions to the science studies literature to show how, rather than spelling the “death of natur…
Stories are seeds. We need to learn how to sow other stories about plants
In this interview, Natasha Myers discusses her understanding of plants and the relational stories they tell. As a scholar, activist, and artist based in Toronto, Canada, Myers proposes ways to detune Western norms and forms of sense-making, to expand our sensorium, and participate with plants in the stories they tell. Calling out the colonial violence, racial injustice, and neo-Darwinism that are lurking within the stories people still tell about…
Animating Mechanism
In the scientific literature, proteins are frequently figured as molecular machines; that is, as tiny mechanisms that operate in interlocking assemblages, and which act to build and maintain the body as a higher-order machine. Mechanical models parse living bodies in ways that seem, at first glance, to deaden lively processes. I build on feminist contributions to the science studies literature to show how, rather than spelling the “death of natur…
Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography
Protein molecules, those objects of increasing interest and investment in post-genomics research, are complex, three-dimensional structures made up of thousands of atoms. Protein crystallographers build atomic-resolution models of proteins using the techniques of X-ray diffraction. This ethnographic study of protein crystallography shows that becoming an expert crystallographer, and so making sense of such intricate objects, requires researchers …
Pedagogy and Performativity
A recently released documentary on life in a protein crystallography laboratory offers an exemplary opportunity to examine how a popular account of scientific training models narrowly defined norms of masculinity and mentorship and simultaneously sets these as the tacit conditions for success in science. Rather than treating this documentary as a good or bad representation of what life in the lab is actually like, this analysis draws attention to…
Dance Your PhD
In 2008 Science Magazine and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science hosted the first ever Dance Your PhD Contest in Vienna, Austria. Calls for submission to the second, third, and fourth annual Dance Your PhD contests followed suit, attracting hundreds of entries and featuring scientists based in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the UK. These contests have drawn significant media attention. While much of the commentary has focus…
Involutionary Momentum
This essay puts forth a theory of "affective ecologies" encompassing plant, animal, and human interactions. The authors' formulation of "involution" favors a coevolution of organisms that act not on competitive pressures but on affective relations. Drawing in particular from-and challenging-Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of orchid-insect contact and controversial research on plant communication, Hustak and Myers demonstrate the interdepende…
Rendering Life Molecular
The politics of care in technoscience
Care is a slippery word. Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks impor…
Ungrid-able Ecologies
In the photo essay that follows, I share some field notes two years into a long-term research-creation collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona. Becoming Sensor mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise. Part of a long-term ethnographic research project on an urban park in Toronto, Becoming Sensor speculates on protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural h…
From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene
Debbora Battaglia’s essay opens portals to entire worlds that turn around plants, sites in which people and their attendant techniques, technologies, and magic get caught in the spiralling whorl of
Knowings and Knots
From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens against Eden
Anthropologist as Transducer in a Field of Affects
Elements
Reactivating Elements
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineeri…
Introduction. Elements
Stories are seeds. We need to learn how to sow other stories about plants
In this interview, Natasha Myers discusses her understanding of plants and the relational stories they tell. As a scholar, activist, and artist based in Toronto, Canada, Myers proposes ways to detune Western norms and forms of sense-making, to expand our sensorium, and participate with plants in the stories they tell. Calling out the colonial violence, racial injustice, and neo-Darwinism that are lurking within the stories people still tell about…
Sociology (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Art (5 works) · History (5 works) · Art history (4 works) · Ecology (4 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 works)