Distributed by University of Minnesota Press, Weather and the Whale is an exciting interdisciplinary catalog combining artworks, critical and creative texts, and new scientific research about whales and other marine mammals to both sound a warning of the irreversible consequences of the collapsing climate and offer alternative possibilities for living during these challenging times.

Artists: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Carolina Caycedo, Sharon Daniel, Yolande Harris, Christine Howard Sandoval, Ashley Hunt, Courtney Leonard, John Jota Leaños, Libia Posada, Mia Eve Rollow, Whale Liberation Front, Sam Williams, Suné Woods.

Scientists: Natalia Botero-Acosta, Chloe Lew, Logan Pallin.

Other contributors: Guillermo Delgado-P., Cory Diane, Mirra-Margarita Ianeva, LuLing Osofsky, Kailani Polzak, Şebnem Susam-Saraeva, Zac Zimmer.

Kailani Polzak (Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture) is an art historian who focuses on European visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular attention to histories of science, aesthetic philosophy, race, colonialism, and intercultural contact in Oceania. Her current book project, Difference Over Distance: Visualizing Contact between Europe and Oceania, examines the graphic and printed works created in relation to so-called “Voyages of Discovery” conducted by Britain, France, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were mobilized in arguments about the origins of human difference in Europe and the United States. Her research and publications also emphasize the methodological questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives.

Guillermo Delgado-P is an anthropologist, Quechua linguist, and cultural journalist. He taught in the Anthropology and LALS Departments. As a Latin Americanist his research focuses on Indigeneities and Andean biome relationalities with special attention to the anthropogenic detritus of extractivism in underground and surface mining (think e.g. of lithium, rare earths). His most recent article “Genomics, Indigeneity, Bio-Prospecting,” is in L. Lorusso and R.G. Winther, (Eds.)  Remapping Race in a Global Context (2022)

Zac Zimmer (Associate Professor of Literature) is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture and technology in the hemispheric Americas. His book First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC’s Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure.