Date/Time
Date(s) - Wed 11 June
12:00 - 13:00
Location
KK105, Kirk Building, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Kelburn, Wellington
Dr Sumin Myung analyses how forest scientists weave scientific narratives through their everyday practices in forest plots.
Dr Sumin Myung – Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology
This talk examines how scientific narrativity shapes expertise in South Korean forest sciences through what Dr Myung calls “scientific emplotment,” a carefully coordinated practice of storyline and place. Based on 36 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 and 2022, he analyzes how forest scientists weave scientific narratives through their everyday practices in forest plots. Rather than treating storytelling as secondary to scientific expertise, he suggests that scientific narrativity is constitutive to knowledge production about changing forests from the beginning, not just after the fact. He shows how forest scientists employ various “plotting” strategies—including forest typology, species selection, and forest staging—to transform situations of life in the forest into situations of science in the field. These acts of emplotment not only generate scientific data, but also create and maintain scientific situations by stitching together particular actors, places, and events. Furthermore, he illustrates how scientific emplotment transcends dominant nationalist and statist narratives of forest regeneration in postcolonial South Korea by incorporating the liveliness of trees and soils into scientific storytelling. The talk reveals how forest scientists contour their expertise in forest regeneration, make sense of complex forest worlds in transition, and organize their findings and practices, while also illuminating how scientific narrativity shapes collective responses to environmental change and crisis.
Sumin Myung (he/him) is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2024. He works across anthropology of science and environmental humanities, with a regional focus on South Korea and East Asia. Sumin’s current book project, tentatively titled Crafting Forests, Claiming Futures: Forest Sciences and the Politics of Anthropogenic Forests in South Korea, is based on 36 months of fieldwork in South Korea with elite forest scientists and experts in forest regeneration after Japanese colonialism and the Korean War.