I am writing about the weather

Abstract

In this thesis I approach meteorology through a performance studies framework, arguing for a diversity of understandings of what meteorological practice can be. I centre ontologies emerging from marginalised and situated localities, relying heavily on notions of Butlerian performativity and Baradian enactment to argue for a multiplicity of ways of knowing the weather, or, meteorologies.

My text maintains that weather is inherently political and agential, enacted through material-discursive collisions of manifold agents. I do not negate the field of western scientific meteorology as it currently exists, but instead argues for new meeting places between sites that might not be yet understood as meteorological, citing examples from performance studies, disability studies, Indigenous studies, activism and artistic practice.

I argue for skill and virtuosity, which I define as emerging from rehearsal. I commit to an understanding of rehearsed and virtuosic skills as expanded and not limited to those skills normatively reified, for example by academia. I propose that manifold, marginalised virtuosities might be meteorological.

Following Martinican philosopher Éduard Glissant, my work is committed to the right to opacity of all things and names that much of what might be meteorologies, is unknowable by an Other. I argue that such fragmentation and unknowability provides generative grounds for meeting places between all kinds of things, where amongst other meteorologies might emerge. I argue that as we all rehearse something, all of us might be meteorologists.