Permutable Stratosphere: Overflights and a Geopoetics of Transpacific Top Secrecy (1958-2024)

Speaker: Jerry Zee, Princeton University.

Abstract: This talk explores how the stratosphere has taken shape as a front in the shifting geopolitics of China, Taiwan, and the United States. Thinking oceanic relation from the high atmosphere, we trace a history of spyplanes, balloons, cover stories, and clouds to investigate how the gray zones between meteorological research and reconnaissance spycraft continuously throw the sky into permutations of the geopolitical and the geophysical. From early US overflights over the Taiwan Straits and secret missions over mainland China in the Cold War, and the various ways that Sino-Taiwanese-American relations have coalesced around balloons that alternately appear to collect weather and intelligence data, we ask how top secrecy in the sky takes form through subtle and increasingly incredible performances of state public-ness.Assistant Professor Jerry Zee is jointly appointed in the Department Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Zee is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores geophysical and environmental emergence as sites of political experiment. His work is situated at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and experimental ethnography. He considers the rise of China as a matter of geophysical and geopolitical entanglement, moving across weather systems that connect inland land degradation, major dust storm formation, and the eventual scattering of Chinese land as meteorological fallout across the Northern Hemisphere. He comes to Princeton after having served as assistant professor in Anthropology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Fellow. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department and was Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis in Anthropology and the Program in Science and Technology Studies.

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