Rutgers Department of Geography — Speaker Series
Permutable Stratosphere: Overflights and a Geopolitics of Transpacific Top Secrecy (1958–2024)
Speaker: Jerry Zee, Princeton University
Talk description: This talk explores how the stratosphere has taken shape as a front in the shifting geopolitics of China, Taiwan, and the United States. Thinking across historical geography and atmospheric science, the talk traces the emergence of the stratosphere as a site of atmospheric governance through overflights, sonic and acoustic tracking, high frequency surveillance, and the production of atmospheric models. The talk considers how the stratosphere has become a medium through which the Cold War’s secret missions over mainland China and Taiwan continue to reverberate across trans-Pacific relations. It explores how secrecy circulates through the stratosphere, and how the stratosphere itself has become an archive that can be read for top secret histories. Drawing on fieldwork in China, Taiwan, and the US, the talk explores how the sky takes form as a space through which incredible performances of secrecy continue to unfold.
Speaker bio: Jerry Zee is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the author of Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (University of California Press, 2022). He is currently working on a second book project on the geopolitics of the stratosphere, and the emergence of the sky as a medium of trans-Pacific secrecy. He received his PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Co-sponsors: Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies Rutgers Global Asia Initiative