This panel explores sensing with, through, and across multispecies bodies and geographies as a framework for critiquing Western scientific knowledge production. By calibrating to the sensorium of oysters, poisonous plants, and other bodies, we analyze how attunement to the more-than-human reveals distributions of environmental violence, as well as the ontological distinctions and exclusions upon which those distributions are predicated. The insensate anthropocentrism that has long existed at the foundation of Western science is dependent on the transformation of empirical information into de- corporealized and un-situated data. Aligned with the refusals of such a scientific framework offered by feminist and anti-colonial STS, we are invested in the reconfiguration of the knowing subject through the fullness of bodily sensation, a fullness that pulses in relation to beings entangled with the specificity of place. By injecting the fleshy, the briny and the poisonous into our analyses, we consider corporeal and epistemic entanglement not in the abstract but in states of brewing corrosivity, seeking to make sense of the insensate body.

Joe Sussi √ (University of Oregon, USA)

Sensing out the Manchineel: Embodied Plant Toxicity in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Farmacopea (2013)

My paper analyzes how toxic plants are framed as intimate entities within the Caribbean landscape in the silent film Farmacopea by Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Her version of the farmacopea, historical documents used to categorize medicinal plants, includes those perceived as harmful to humans, such as the Manchineel, considered the most toxic plant in the world and native to the Caribbean archipelago. Over the past century, removing poisonous plants has been deemed necessary for economic development. Simultaneously, U.S. experiments with contraceptive pills conducted on Afro-Caribbean and Taíno women led to permanent sterilization and were seen as a modernization step aimed at reducing the Black population. This experimentation and plant destruction are intertwined with histories of colonialism and terraforming in the Caribbean. I argue that rendering Indigenous plants and bodies materially and discursively toxic has facilitated the dispossession of Puerto Rico. In contrast, Santiago Muñoz’s films envision a sensory history that embraces toxic plants and the chemical relationships embedded within Puerto Rican geography, challenging Western anthropocentrism. Through an analysis of the Caribbean farmacopea proposed by Santiago Muñoz, I explore the intertwined histories of Western science and cultural definitions of toxicity, alongside how race and class intersect with Afro-Caribbean and Taíno reproductive rights. Keywords: toxicity, embodiment, plant studies

Megan Hayes √ (University of Oregon, USA)

Body/Litmus

A person deeply attuned to their marine ecology can gauge salinity by submerging their finger into ocean water and tasting it. That same taste, however, will not disclose the water’s pH. A logarithmic scale indicating the acidity or alkalinity of a substance, pH is most often rendered visible—which is to say available to the senses—using the respective red and blue hues of litmus paper. Despite the fact that the ocean has over the past two hundred and sixty years of industrialisation become twenty-five percent more acidic, dropping from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1, it is a shift to which our senses, ostensibly, are not attuned. This paper explores how ocean acidification—an archive of two centuries worth of carbonic detritus from a planet carved out as a modernist grid for colonial empire and global capital—evades the colonial impulses of capture and abstraction embedded in scientific practice. At the same time, it will consider how the ocean allows its chemistry to be sensed and made sense of through multispecies relation between humans and oysters at the edge of land and sea. In this reading, the ocean rears as an agent pushing against the limits of what counts as thinkable or knowable in dominant fields of the sensible.
Keywords: Ocean acidification, oysters, feminist STS, embodied knowledge

Elizabeth McQueen (University of California Davis, USA)

Tasting Panels and Planets: The Performance of Terroir in the Illicit Gin Assemblies

Due to petrocapitalist and agricultural exploitation, Niger Delta’s ecology has gone through extremely violent change. Top exports from crude petroleum to cocoa beans extract and destroy soil and social life. Yet despite the ecological collapse, artists, artisans, palm wine tappers, and distillers have transformed organic matter through fermentation into a transformative commodity and sensory experience through the historical practice of illicit gin. This presentation savors the Illicit Gin Assemblies, a contemporary food-performance art series by artist Zina Saro-Wiwa (Los Angeles, London, Port Harcourt), as a performance that transforms the organic matter of the Niger Delta into a consumable performance piece while also changing dominant conceptions of taste in performance. Her production and communal consumption of Sarogua, a palm-wine-based gin created in a distillery that Saro-Wiwa built and operates in the Niger Delta, served as the main actant in an assembly and silent-tasting performance in Los Angeles in November 2021. Yet, how do we grapple with the subjective process of taste, especially in performance, where audience members are not "trained sensory panelists," but rather subjective sippers, feelers, and responders to performance? With an illicit reading of aroma wheels and tasting panels to incorporate the complexity of environmental matter, this talk re-proposes terroir as an analytic for food and taste in performance.
Keywords: performance, food, terroir, taste, Niger Delta