Emma Gertrude Pask

EMMA PASK, then a graduate student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Ecologists on the Range: Bats, Biosecurity, and Texas’ Other Sovereign Stories,” supervised by Dr. Joseph Masco. Texas’ stories about itself paint a landscape of cows and cow-culture spreading out across “the range.” These stories obscure its history as an extractive settler-colonial space, shaped by dispossession, plantation slavery, and violent bordering measures. On the range, where directly talking about politics — even environmental politics — is met with historically inherited and impenetrable scripts about the land, talking about bats interrupts these storytelling conventions. Bats, like cows, are omnipresent in Texas. And bats are strange model organisms with which to conduct anthropological research: they are border-crossers, disease vectors, economic aids, and environmental disruptors. They both disrupt and reify the practices and the stories of the range precisely because they are so difficult to categorize, study, and even hold. Bat scientists follow these animals in this place that is 95% private property, in which human lives and wildlife are treated through unstable hierarchies even in their shared ecological reality, and in which unlivable heat worsens every summer. This project, an ethnography of bat scientists in Texas, uses the disruptive bat to explore the management of the range, a scientific and political project of arranging life on land by determining where the lines are between pests, livestock, invasives, game, and native species.