Charles Zerner
Office: North 2
Phone: (914) 395-2401
Email: czerner@slc.edu
Statement of Research
Charles Zerner, is the Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the Director of Intersections: Boundary Work in Science, the Humanities, and the Arts, an annual interdisciplinary colloquium series on contemporary environmental issues.
Charles Zerner's current research focuses on the emergence of a dimension of the environment he calls stealth nature: the creation of forms of life, designed by biologists and engineers, containing electro-mechanical components. Stealth insects, for example, including Monarch butterflies with cybernetic components, or purely mechanical "warbots" in the form of dragonflies, are being designed and tested to assess their capacities to conduct surveillance operations. These creatures are designed to blend in with other living creatures and environmental ecologies, thus making stealth and surveillance possible. Zerner is engaged in asking several kinds of questions about these "vivisystems" including: What states of nature do we dream? What kinds of governance and powers over nature do we wish to legitimize, empower, and enact? How will the creation of machinic organisms -- cyborgian creatures -- be judged or regulated? Can we begin to create an ethical, moral, and political language that lays the groundwork for judging and critically assessing interventions in the structure of the organic world, while avoiding the pitfalls of a fantasized, green, sacralized pristine nature, on the one hand, or an uncritical celebration of polymorphous hybridity, on the other hand? These are questions about the history of our ideas of and attitudes toward nature. Crossing the boundaries of culture, biology, engineering, and ethics, Zerner’s research on military design and anticipated uses of vivisystems as potential tools for surveillance and attack, a process he calls the weaponization of life, poses unsettling questions in the humanities and the arts.
Mr. Zerner's career trajectory has spanned the arts, social sciences, and most recently, issues in science, technology, and society. Trained as a lawyer (J.D.) and as an architect (M.Arch.), Zerner worked as a botanical artist drawing the "weeds of Cambridge, Massachusetts" as Artist-in Residence for Cambridge. He taught drawing to architects at the Massachusetts College of the Arts and the Boston Architectural Center. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork on environmental ritual and common property management of marine and forest environments in Sulawesi, Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and the Moluccan islands of Indonesia. Zerner has made a distinctive contribution to the international environmental justice field, linking issues of culture and rights to environmental policy. Charles Zerner is a contributing editor of Culture and the Question of Rights: Forest, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia (2003), People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation (2000), co-editor of Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Resource Management (2005) and Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005).