Led by Cynthia Browne, this working group explores how the logic and grammar of exposure have become an integral component of environmental knowledge through documentary and counter-documentary practices. Such practices mediate how exposure, which is always already in relation, becomes materialized. As these materializations become circulated, stored, and arranged as data or evidence, they become entangled with other connotations of exposure: as a matter of disclosing or revealing aspects of worlds across varying sites and scales.
One key focus of the group is how different collectives and communities work both with and against science to conceptualize the relation between materializations of exposure and histories of colonialism, extraction, racism, and dispossession. Another focus is on how certain media and materials become constructed, sensitized, and deployed to document exposure, and how they come to play a role in knowledge formation, legal regulations, political claim-making, and public recognition.
Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and artistic methods, the working group marshals the polysemy of exposure as a heuristic for examining encounters with toxic substances, radioactivity, noise, viruses, light, and other phenomena. Overall, the working group aims to improve our understanding of the potentials and limits of exposure as a form of epistemic action within contemporary contestations of environmental knowledge, data, risk, and crisis talk.