I’m really excited that I’m going to be doing the Toxicity 101 project because it’s a great opportunity for me to meld the objectives of this course with my own academic interests. My dissertation project is taking a lot of interesting twists and turns at the moment, the most recent of which has brought me to scientists working with bird specimens. I spent a big chunk of this summer interviewing volunteers with the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, who pick up migratory birds that have flown into buildings in downtown Chicago. The dead birds are transported to the Field Museum, where they join a uniquely extensive collection of bird specimens that scientists are using for… science. I’ve been told that it’s climate-change related science but that’s just about as vague. My next step is to figure out a little bit more about what kinds of questions these researchers are addressing and what kinds of conversations about broader environmental harm are popular in ornithology at the moment. I’ve identified a couple of folks in Houston (and at Rice specifically) who I think I would like to chat more with for this project, and this week I’m going to reach out to a few. Even if they are not interested in participating in the video project, I know these conversations are going to help inform the research questions I’m developing.
The main thing I want to remind myself of, however, is that this project isn’t necessarily supposed to prioritize my own work and my own research. We’re making videos for a community-based organization. This is work that is meant to be shared, and is meant to be relevant to others. I want to go into this project thinking first about how what kinds of representations I’m making would matter to community stakeholders, and second how they matter to my individual project.
To broaden a bit: I am interested in how animal bodies act as sentinels for environmental harm. How does animal suffering come to matter to humans in ways that spur them to action? What kinds of canaries in the coal mine (winged and otherwise) are there in Houston, and who is listening and how? I think this question as my central focus will help me link up my research and community interests in an appropriate way.