Agenda

NewBooks | Ocean Waves, Ocean Science, Ocean Media

2 April 2025, 4PM CEST
Aula Baratto, University Ca' Foscari of Venice

Stefan Helmreich
MIT Anthropology Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Visiting scholar at NICHE

Abstract:
This talk will draw from Stefan Helmreich's latest book, A Book of Waves, an anthropological examination of how oceanographers and coastal engineers — mostly in the US and the Netherlands, though also in Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh — study waves. The talk will treat how these scientists represent waves as avatars of an oceanic nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal, and I discuss how they do so in the field, lab, and computer. I argue that wave science, so bound up with prediction, is about time, about orientations toward the future — coastal, environmental, national, political, and planetary.