Behind the Science: Performance and Uncertainty

In February 2019, then-sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg stood onstage with seven other young activists at the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels. In a speech performed before an audience of bureaucrats, she said, “most politicians don’t want to talk to us. Good, we don’t want to talk to them either. We want them to talk to the scientists instead. Listen to them, because we are just repeating what they are saying and have been saying for decades… We don’t have any other manifestos or demands - you unite behind the science, that is our demand.” But what does it mean to unite behind the science? Soon after, two pieces in Nature Climate Change suggested that Thunberg’s demand has serious limitations because it assumes science is a site of answers, not questions. For example, the Nature Climate Change editors noted that “the word “uncertainty” itself has slightly different meanings when used in everyday speech versus a scientific context. In scientific discourse, it conveys the degree to which something is known. In the vernacular, the word conveys rather the sense of not knowing. The difference is subtle, but important.” However, I suggest that Thunberg and other intersectional women in the scientific public sphere use identity to perform a rejection of certainty, opening up spaces for uncertainty within their scientific-political activism. For TaPRA 2021 Performance and Science: Working Scientifically, this lecture performance explores the relationship among performance, science, and uncertainty. It combines Thunberg’s public performances of climate change activism with political theorist Hannah Arendt’s writings on the role of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in society and theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s recent reexamination of the laws of gravity to create an imagined dialogue among three intersectional women working at the nexus of science, knowledge, activism, and the public sphere.