6:30 p.m.
Sharing on a public forum in 2019 how he felt about global warming, ecology professor Corey Bradshaw did not restrain his outrage, stating, “My frustration with these greedy, lying bastards is personal. Mark my words, you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks and science charlatans—your time will come when you will be backed against the wall by the full wrath of billions who have suffered from your greed… and I’ll be first in line to put you
there.” Raging against world leaders failing to stem climate breakdown and its engine in capitalism, Bradshaw offers candid, unambiguous translation of climate science where emotion, not jargon, communicates both the stakes of research and the affective repercussions of ignoring them. This lecture lingers on the widespread recognition that proliferating climate data, and by extension growing literacy and awareness, has not led to the substantive changes called for with escalating urgency by experts, activists, and advocates alike. It grounds these troubled feelings among experts in the exponential unfolding of the climate catastrophe: it is not a gradual change; it is change that accelerates, possessing tipping points beyond which mitigation becomes painfully arduous if not impossible. Rather than forwarding solutions to the crisis, of which there are many, this lecture stays with the difficult feeling of grappling with exponential change, approaching it as, to borrow from Lauren Berlant (2011), a “measurement” of a situation, that is, of a future whose scale of suffering experts call “incalculable” and “catastrophic” (Scientists’ Statement of Support for Non-Violent Direct Action, 2019).
Biography:
Cristina Visperas is associate professor of communication at the University of Southern California and affiliate faculty at the Center for Science, Technology, and Public Life. She is author of the book Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory, which was a finalist for the 2023 Book Prize of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. This book revisits the notorious skin experiments conducted between 1952 and 1974 at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, examining how carceral spaces became sites for producing scientific knowledge and regulatory guidelines on human subject experimentation. Alternately, the book forwards a bioethics in line with the principles of prison abolition.
Professor Visperas received her Ph.D in Communication, Science Studies, at the University of California, San Diego, during which time she was founding managing editor of the open-access journal, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is currently on the journal’s editorial board and served as its book editor from 2022 to 2025. Prior, she received her B.S. in biotechnology at UC Davis, and was a laboratory scientist for nearly a decade, conducting research on a range of topics from novel antibiotic discovery to neural stem cell potency. Currently, she teaches courses on cultural studies, visual studies, and science and technology studies, while working on her next book on emotions and the climate crisis.
Department Sponsors: The Graduate School, Department of American Ethnic Studies, Department of Communication, Department of Geography, Department of Legal Studies UW Tacoma