Natasha Myers

Natasha is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, convener of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, co-founder of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and the Write2Know Project.

Natasha Myers

Natasha is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, convener of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, co-founder of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and the Write2Know Project.

Plant Studies: Art, Science, and Ecology With support from an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government and a SSHRC RDI Grant, Natasha convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies.

Her plant-based research documents the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species relations. She examines how the phenomena of plant sensing and communication are galvanising inquiry in both the arts and the sciences, and how people stage their relations with plants in botanical gardens and in ecological restoration projects in urban parks. These projects are part of a new book she is working on called Rooting into the Planthroposcene: Seeding Plant/People Conspiracies to Grow Livable Worlds.

Recent talks include: ‘From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens Against Eden: Plants and People in and After the Anthropocene‘ and ‘Ungrid-able Ecologies’. She also tells stories about plants on the Cultures of Energy Podcast, and Becoming Sensor is an experiment with protocols for an “ungrid-able ecology” in the form of a research-creation collaboration with award winning filmmaker and dancer, Ayelen Liberona. Their recent video work includes Alchemical Cinema, Take 1, and Rooting into the Planthroposcene.

The Lively Sciences Natasha’s first book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands?

Rendering Life Molecular received the 2016 Robert K. Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Teaching Natasha’s teaching, grounded in decolonial feminist praxis, explores the history of anthropological theory, the anthropology of the senses, the anthropology of science and technology, more-than-human ethnography, feminist technoscience, the intersections of race, gender and science, the craft of scientific practice, and the power of facts in social worlds.

Natasha Myers on advaya