I am happy to introduce Amelia Moore to this blog. Amelia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork in the Bahamas (and the U.S.). Her terrific research project focuses on biocomplexity and resonates with many other projects conducted by our little group over here at the vss blog. Amelia recently sent me a short description of her research project. To learn more, read on! Investigating Biocomplexity: Forms of Contemporary Environmental Research in the BahamasI am currently conducting my dissertation fieldwork in several locations in The Bahamas. As an archipelago of over 700 low lying islands protected by the world’s third largest reef system, The Bahamas is perceived by reef biologists and conservationists as a uniquely situated site for contemporary environmental research projects concerning marine reserve design and human/environment interaction. Regional fears about climate change, fisheries stability, and ecological and social vulnerability lend a necessary urgency to this research, creating a space, like many in the world, where potential crisis is simultaneously an opportunity to devise emergent scientific forms. My own work focuses on the experts and technicians, Bahamian and foreign, involved in environmental research and management in The Bahamas, and on the ways in which they create and utilize practical forms of knowledge and reinvent, or remediate, general ideas.The general questions guiding my study are the same questions which currently structure the expanding domain of contemporary environmental research as an increasingly globally oriented phenomenon. They are, what is the human relation to the environment, what are the changes occurring within that relation, what is the best way to go about intervening in that relation in order to prevent catastrophe, and how do we come to know what is best? The questions might also be rephrased as, what is life today, how is life changing today, what is at stake for life today, and how do we secure life today? These questions delineate a growing problem space around the notion of life today. My own work takes this up as an anthropological problem concerning the way in which life today, in a certain domain of action, has become simultaneously an object and a question in a milieu of perceived difficulties and crisis.Investigating the ways in which life has become a question today, how it has become problematized in the realm of environmental research, also entails investigating how problems travel across the globe, how specific projects are designed to address them, and how specific research sites are selected as the location of possible answers. This leads me from research centers of the US- the NSF headquarters and the Center for Biodiversity Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History- to my primary field site. My own research in The Bahamas will be an investigation of the milieu of international research projects- the current and historical concerns and proposed interventions surrounding coral reef conservation and fisheries sustainability that situate the projects within that archipelagic nation. I want to consider the ways in which the Bahamas, through its marine ecology and specific social, political, and economic situating, became a site for the investigation of such “global” problems; I want to consider the various ways in which data is produced from this site; and I also want to consider how particular projects come to appeal to certain Bahamian governmental and non-governmental institutions and actors as an appropriate means through which to generate knowledge about conditions in the Bahamas.One aspect of my research concerns the notion of biocomplexity as one new formulation of life within this problem space which enables the objectification and investigation of life in novel ways. It is also a scientific assemblage which has formed as one attempt to begin to answer these questions about life today. In an article in Bioscience derived from a panel discussion at the 2001 annual meeting for the American Institute for Biological Sciences, “Defining and Unraveling Biocomplexity,” biocomplexity is referred to as a concept intuitively grasped by scientists and engineers. The panelists proposed a tentative definition for the term, with the presumption that this definition would be modified in the future: Biocomplexity is “properties emerging from the interplay of behavioral, biological, chemical, physical, and social interactions that affect, sustain, or are modified by living organisms, including humans.” I propose to examine a particular moment in environmental research, a moment comprising the recent past, present, and near future, that is the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Biocomplexity in the Environment Investment Program. I will approach this program, and the notion of biocomplexity in an imperiled global ecosystem that it promoted, through a specific project funded by the NSF from 2000 to 2006, the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project (BBP) and its current permutations.The role of the social scientist within the emergent biocomplexity assemblage is also a primary concern of mine precisely because their involvement is an explicit aspect of the problematization of contemporary environmental research. As notions of life become increasingly construed as complex, the distinctions between what is considered human and what is considered nature become increasingly blurred and rearticulated in new ways. Social scientists, as researchers authorized to produce knowledge about human organization and behavior, are now implicated in the production of knowledge about nature because nature itself, understood as the dynamic and complex processes of life (understood as biocomplexity) now has an integral (or internal) human component. Interdisciplinarity has become the mode through which research is conducted in the biocomplexity assemblage, and social scientists participate with natural scientists and life scientists on the common project of elucidating the complex systems of planetary life. In other words, the problematization of life within the biocomplexity assemblage requires an attention to holism in research design which necessitates the inclusion of social scientists in some projects as representatives of the social component of life. Contemporary environmental research may be instantiating a return to cosmological thinking, though this new sort of cosmology as biocomplexity is less concerned with proving the existence of God than it is with securing or saving vital living systems from collapse and catastrophe. I am concerned with the potential implications of such an internalization of social science within this assemblage.Finally, my research pays attention to the history of social scientific research in The Bahamas and the Caribbean, and the particular problematizations therein which resonate in interesting ways with the emergent problematization of life. Since the anthropological and sociological “discovery” of the Caribbean as a socially distinct geographic region, the area has long been construed as the site which either embodied or prefigured the worldwide complexification and globalization of human social, political, and economic processes. The region became a conceptual testing ground which broke conventional social theory, forcing an attention to contact, complexity, dynamism, scale, change, and the development of new concepts and research designs. The contemporary Caribbean, conceived of as the site of dynamic human and natural marine systems, is again figured as an embodiment of complexity within the frame of biocomplexity research, and I hope to remain attentive to the ways in which these two problems, the problem of life and the problem of the Caribbean, may potentially parallel, intersect, or reinforce each other in the Bahamian milieu, and to the way in which these problems are articulated and internalized by BBP scientists, Bahamian conservationists, teachers and lecturers, governmental and NGO officials, and Bahamian fishers.