tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38679019303478171182024-03-13T15:55:15.999-07:00Topographcontested landscapes of knowingMartin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-44752254259423015842016-01-18T04:28:00.000-08:002016-01-18T04:28:10.575-08:00This blog is in hibernationThanks to all those who have been following this blog for the last few years. Now that we have finished our PhDs and are starting new academic projects of our own in different areas we have decided that it is best for us both to blog on our own dedicated websites, rather than on this shared space. We will leave the Topograph archive as it is, but please be aware that this blog will no longer be updated.<br />
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Martin is now a British Academy and Nottingham Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham, working on the historical geographies of science, empire and climate. He now has a <a href="http://imperialweather.com/">dedicated website</a> for updates from his project.<br />
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Helen is currently a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia working on a UK Energy Research Centre Project on public participation in energy transitions. From April 2016 she will be taking up a lectureship in the Human Geography of the Environment at the University of East Anglia. Follow her <a href="https://helenpallett.wordpress.com/">new blog</a> for updates on new research projects and teaching.Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-85007872328336148792015-12-07T08:52:00.003-08:002015-12-07T08:52:52.463-08:00New website: imperialweather.com<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Martin<br />
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I've created a new website - <a href="http://www.imperialweather.com/">www.imperialweather.com</a> - dedicated to my fellowship project which I described in the previous post. I though it would be a good idea to gather together blog posts, publications and updates from this project all in one place. Enjoy!</div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-550946162622489132015-12-04T08:29:00.000-08:002015-12-08T04:11:49.625-08:00New post at Nottingham and the 'Imperial Weather' project<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By <a href="https://twitter.com/martin_mahony">Martin </a><br />
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It's been a long time coming but this week I finally took up my new fellowship position in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. Officially, I'm a <a href="http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/Postdoctoral_Fellows.cfm">British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow</a> and <a href="https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/fellowships/nottingham-research-fellowships/index.aspx">Nottingham Research Fellow</a>, which means three years of research funding to develop a project on climate, empire and the history of colonial meteorology called 'Imperial weather: meteorology and the making of 20th century colonialism' (check out my new project website at <a href="http://imperialweather.com/">imperialweather.com</a>). Essentially this project is building upon and deepening the work I did at King's College London with the help of some funding from the RGS-IBG (see <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/commonwealth-climates-project-report.html">here</a>).<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BTqUpvho6L8/VmG9UAY9WnI/AAAAAAAAMFw/LRbisgyc03c/s1600/weather%2Bmap%2Bcropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="369" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BTqUpvho6L8/VmG9UAY9WnI/AAAAAAAAMFw/LRbisgyc03c/s640/weather%2Bmap%2Bcropped.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Nottingham will be a great place to develop this work, with a lot of expertise in the cultural and historical geography group on environmental history, empire, and the history of science. I'll be working closely with Georgina Endfield, who's done lots of important work on climate history and the history of meteorology.<br />
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For my RGS-IBG funded work I used UK-based archives to examine the history of imperial meteorology from the early to mid-20th century, focusing in particular on a series of conferences which brought together Britain's colonial weathermen to discuss how meteorology could best serve the Empire, and vice-versa. This work will be out soon in the <i>Journal of Historical Geography</i>. With this new project I'll be able to dig deeper into these archives, as well as exploring some colonial archives overseas, in a bid to understand more closely how meteorological knowledges, of various sorts. were woven into colonial societies and government.<br />
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There are a number of key themes which I'm aiming to explore. One concerns the relationship between metropolitan and colonial forms of scientific practice - how did practices of observing and predicting the weather circulate around the British Empire, and how did they change along the way? How did dominant ways of thinking about the links between climate and human societies shape the priorities of colonial meteorologists, as well as their social standing in colonial societies? In addition to the circulation of ideas, practices and tools, I'm interested in the mobility of people, and the role that travel played in the development of meteorological ideas. I'm currently working on a book chapter on this topic, which will examine British East Africa's Albert Walter and his narration of 'meteorological safaris' as he went about setting up a weather observation infrastructure in East Africa in the early 1930s.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/images/through-a-lens/africa/big/co-1069-8-6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/images/through-a-lens/africa/big/co-1069-8-6.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">'Uncharted</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> country between Eil dur Elan and J Serut. 8,000ft' (1919-20) - National Archives, CO 1069/8</span></span></td></tr>
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Much of the change which occurred in meteorology in the early 20th century was driven by the rise of aviation, and British hopes to establish a system of imperial air communications lent colonial meteorology a new urgency. One aspect of this I find particularly interesting is the question of atmospheric visibility. In the context of aerial warfare in particular, techniques of visual concealment became prominent, with pilots learning to fly at night or in clouds. In these situations the pilot's sense of sight was in many ways delegated to the meteorologist on the ground, who was responsible for offering predictions of approaching weather systems, and of levels of atmospheric visibility itself. These predictions would themselves be products of 'eyeballing' synoptic maps of weather conditions over large areas, which in turn were the products of often unstable networks of weather observers tasked with checking meteorological instruments at regular times. I'm interested in how new ways of inhabiting the atmosphere as a volumetric, turbulent space were built through new assemblages of technical practices, social relationships and different ways of seeing (or seeing through) the atmosphere.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HF9tw9RXuGw/VmG1BDh92sI/AAAAAAAAMFU/M16q29J-XIM/s1600/Davies%2B1952%2B%252825%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="427" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HF9tw9RXuGw/VmG1BDh92sI/AAAAAAAAMFU/M16q29J-XIM/s640/Davies%2B1952%2B%252825%2529.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A flight forecast chart, from DA Davies, 1952, <i>East Africa's Weather Service</i>, available at the National Meteorological Library and Archive, Exeter</td></tr>
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I'm also planning to explore how meteorology and climatology intersected with the agricultural economies of empire. I've already done some work on Albert Walter's involvement with the ill-fated postwar 'Groundnut Scheme' in colonial Tanganyika, which consisted of him being hired and fired as an official meteorological advisor before the attempt to grow groundnuts on an industrial scale within what Walter called a 'marginal climate' failed rather miserably. I plan to write-up this story for an edited collection I'm putting together with Sam Randalls (UCL), which will feature a number of historians of science and historical geographers discussing how knowledges of weather and climate have informed the '<a href="https://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/geography/n477.xml">geographical imagination</a>' (see also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_geographies">here</a>), while exhibiting and producing distinctive geographies of their own. Meanwhile, I plan to make use of new archival sources to examine the emergence of 'agricultural meteorology' as a form of applied science, or perhaps a '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_zones">trading zone</a>' between different disciplines and traditions, and to trace how these new forms of knowledge intersected with different models of colonial development and political economy. British East Africa will remain a focus, along with some new work on British Malaya and, potentially, South Africa and India.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ld4Kloa7t0M/VmG3rI7UHrI/AAAAAAAAMFg/KCZFfM6DakU/s1600/Women%2Bpulling%2Bflax%2Bon%2Ba%2BHighland%2Bfarm%2BCO1069.137.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="452" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ld4Kloa7t0M/VmG3rI7UHrI/AAAAAAAAMFg/KCZFfM6DakU/s640/Women%2Bpulling%2Bflax%2Bon%2Ba%2BHighland%2Bfarm%2BCO1069.137.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Women pulling flax on a Highland farm', National Archives CO 1069/137</td></tr>
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Overall, I hope the project will enable me to say something new about how the atmosphere came to be understood as a global system not just through late 20th century computer models but through earlier forms of imperial mobility and colonial knowledge-making, the geographies of which still shape our knowledge and understanding of global processes like climate change in consequential ways (see e.g. this paper by Ben Orlove and colleagues, <a href="http://iri.columbia.edu/~alesall/pubslist/orlove_curranthro2014.pdf">in PDF here</a>, and <a href="http://public.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/igy/node/24">this work on the IGY)</a>. This will mean trying to strike up some new conversations between the parts of history of science which deal with questions about observation, prediction and the place of science in wider cultures and politics, perspectives from environmental history on how ideas about climate have informed different projects of human 'development' and domination, and debates in cultural geography - informed by Luce Irigaray, Peter Sloterdijk and others - about how the question of 'being-in-the-world' is necessarily also a question of 'being-in-the-air'.<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-35823557541809130412015-09-11T07:55:00.001-07:002015-09-11T07:55:20.812-07:00Commonwealth Climates - project report<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've recently been wrapping up some work on the history of meteorology and climatology in the British Empire, funded by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers; RGS-IBG). The final project report which has been submitted to RGS-IBG can be <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3BM1mYKvdJBSUNMc2lvN2g5MlE/view?usp=sharing">downloaded here</a>. A summary of the report is below:<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">What effects did the political structures
of the British Empire and the Commonwealth have on the emergence and spread of
meteorological science globally during the 20<sup>th</sup> century? How did the
development of such global sciences function as legitimating tools in arguments
for continued colonial rule? Such questions arise from a growing body of
scholarship on the historical geographies of colonial science, and were addressed
in this project through archival research on the Conference of Empire
Meteorologists (CEM) and the later Conference of Commonwealth Meteorologists
(CCM). From 1919 these networks provided a space for knowledge exchange and for
scientific standardisation, and offered their imperial backers a science of the
atmosphere which could contribute to the improvement of transport and commerce across
the British Empire. By tracing the priorities and achievements of these
networks from the age of imperial consolidation, through decolonisation and the
emergence of the Commonwealth, it has been possible to explore how
international meteorological and climatological practices have evolved
alongside shifting forms of colonial and postcolonial power. By focusing
attention on sites and time periods heretofore neglected in the history of
meteorology, this project makes important contributions to debates about the
historical geographies of science and empire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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It's been a very productive project, with a number of resulting conference papers and a piece which I'm currently revising for the <i>Journal of Historical Geography</i>. The project also gave me the space to develop much more ambitious plans, which have resulted in me being awarded a <a href="http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/Postdoctoral_Fellows.cfm">British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship</a> and a Nottingham Research Fellowship to pursue related topics in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. I'll be heading up there in December.<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-13276138998112970952015-07-22T08:59:00.003-07:002015-07-22T08:59:49.676-07:00Wrapping up the PhD <a href="https://twitter.com/HelenPallett">By Helen</a><br />
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This Thursday I will officially receive my doctorate at my PhD graduation ceremony. It is now almost seven months since I handed my thesis in and more than five months since I passed my viva. I've been employed as a full-time research associate since the start of 2015, but it seems to take a long time to truly wrap up the PhD. There's of course the small matter of the viva, and then professionally printing and resubmitting the final version of the thesis before you can really breathe a sigh of relief and entertain the thought that you are now moving into a new phase of your (academic) career. And even then there are many loose ends to tie up in terms of reporting important findings to research partners, sharing the finished thesis with them and others, working out when and in what contexts you can use the title 'Dr' before your name, and of course trying to write up high quality journal articles based on your PhD research. Someone told me that it took them until years after completing the PhD to really understand what it was about and see it in broader context, whilst others have said I'll be amazed at how quickly I'll be prepared to cast it aside and move onto other things. </div>
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My public graduation ceremony, however, seems like a good time to draw some sort of line under the PhD experience by reporting on some of my main findings and reflecting on some of the things I've learnt. My PhD thesis entitled 'Organising science policy: participation, learning & experimentation in British democracy' is available open access <a href="https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/53387/">here</a>. Below I have tried to briefly summarise my approach and findings.<br />
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Justification</h3>
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A strong argument in recent academic literature had emphasised the need to look beyond individual instances of public participation
in science policy to gain a more systemic understanding of their multiple forms
and effects. This argument also came in the context of the increased institutionalisation
of public participation methods within governing bodies in the UK, Europe and
beyond, over the past decade – a development which has not yet been extensively
described and analysed by academics. Therefore I chose to look at the institutionalisation of this practice through the lens of organisational learning, in order to capture both the stabilities and shifts in approaches to public participation in the UK.</div>
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Sciencewise is an important body in understanding the
evolution of the UK Government’s approach to public participation. It was
initially launched in 2004 in the wake of high profile calls for public
participation to become an integral part of science policymaking. Since
Sciencewise’s re-launch in 2007 as the Government’s Expert Resource Centre for
public dialogue, the programme has carried out public dialogue processes around
a wide-range of high-profile science policy areas from stem cell regulation to regional
flood responses and an international decision about the use of leap seconds. In
the most recent programme contract, which began in 2012, Sciencewise has built
on its existing reputation, enjoying a higher profile and influence within
Government. </div>
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Approach</h3>
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I conducted a multi-sited ethnography around the UK Government-funded public dialogue programme Sciencewise. Throughout 2013 I attended internal and public meetings related to the programme, interviewed programme actors, and analysed relevant documents in order to gain a better understanding of organisational learning in four different organisational spaces which I had identified around the programme. During the period of research further interesting organisational spaces emerged which I was also able to follow up. All of this data was analysed using an open interpretive coding structure focussed towards my interest in learning and reflection. </div>
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Key findings</h3>
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<li><b>Organisational learning is not straight-forward, linear, uni-vocal or comprehensive</b>, rather it happens differently in different organisational spaces and processes, has many eddies and shifts in course, and is closely wrapped up with the (intentional and unintentional) production of forms of ignorance and non-knowledge. Visions of the past and the future are far from fixed, but rather are continually made and remade through organisational routines and learning processes. Furthermore, learning processes will be interpreted differently from different perspectives in and around an organisation, or in light of later processes and conjunctions.</li>
<li><b>Sciencewise presents itself as a 'learning organisation' and has made significant contributions to thinking and practice on organisational learning and memory, </b>however the programme lacks an explicit focus on thinking about and reflecting on its own internal learning processes (though many individual actors do this), instead focusing on the learning of its partner and contractor bodies. </li>
<li><b>The increased size of the Sciencewise programme from 2012 onwards has both limited and improved its capacities for organisational learning. </b>On the one hand organisational communication processes have become more complicated and formalised, with an increased need for audit processes which generally encourage more instrumental forms of learning (e.g. the learning of key facts and figures). On the other hand a more diverse group of actors and bodies have become involved in the programme since 2012 creating opportunities for learning from external bodies and processes, and encouraging tacit reflection on organisational goals and activities. </li>
<li><b>Sciencewise's prominent role Government debates about open policy had a significant influence on the programme's own understanding of its role and activities</b>, encouraging programme actors to reflect on the range of different ways it might be possible to represent 'public voices' in policy processes, and encouraging the programme to engage with new Government departments and policy areas. </li>
<li><b>Many significant processes of learning and reflection during the period of research came from unexpected places and processes. </b>The open policy debates are a good example of this, as well as an internal 'theory of change' process which was suggested by one of the steering group members, and some more innovative methods used by dialogue partners and contractors in several public dialogue projects.</li>
<li><b>The UK Government model of outsourcing and auditing activities is potentially damaging for more reflective learning</b>, as it creates chains of reporting where the richness of findings presented can easily be lost, or objects are translated and reinterpreted in radically different ways in new contexts. </li>
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Implications for practice</h3>
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<li><b>There is a need for more processes consciously directed at imagining and anticipating the possible futures of public dialogue and engagement</b>, in order to generate leadership in the public engagement field and to identify potential stumbling blocks and possible unintended consequences of new practices. </li>
<li><b>Periodic organised opportunities for collective reflection and learning like Sciencewise's theory of change process are potentially very useful and constructive</b>, in stimulating higher-level learning and bringing together existing processes of learning and reflection.</li>
<li><b>Organisational learning can also be promoted through less resource intensive means, </b>simply through a conscious disposition of experimentation and reflection which is aware that opportunities for learning can emerge from unexpected places, and even perceived mistakes and failures. Small measures put in place to monitor and iteratively modify new activities and ventures could have huge gains in terms of learning and reflection.</li>
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Implications for further research</h3>
<b>Future research on organisational learning could usefully look at the connections between different kinds of organisational spaces</b>, to understand how more transformative insights from often temporary, experimental and informal organisational spaces can sometimes be translated into more general and formalised organisational spaces and activities. Another productive area for further research would be for social scientists to more explicitly experiment with interventions in organisational learning processes in order to monitor the effects on learning and reflexivity. </div>
Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-23393937355141249672015-07-01T07:30:00.000-07:002015-07-01T07:30:50.414-07:00Klimahaus Bremerhaven: in the world interior of climate<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By <a href="https://twitter.com/martin_mahony">Martin</a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5KOJGXaQNl4/VX1kL0xxevI/AAAAAAAAMB0/m8Y_nqOaa4w/s1600/DSC04553.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5KOJGXaQNl4/VX1kL0xxevI/AAAAAAAAMB0/m8Y_nqOaa4w/s320/DSC04553.JPG" width="213" /></a>I recently visited the Klimahaus in Bremerhaven, northern Germany along with cultural anthropologist Werner Krauss. Klimahaus is a unique
museum dedicated to humanity's relationship to climate. The main body of the
museum leads visitors on a journey along the line of 8-degrees Longitude,
following a modern-day explorer as he heads south from Bremerhaven to
Switzerland, through Italy and the Sahara, into Cameroon, across the south
Atlantic and over Antarctica. From there visitors head across the Pacific,
calling in on Samoa and Alaska, before looping back to northern Germany at
Hallig Langeness. At each stop, visitors enter an exhibition dedicated to the
climate of the location, exploring its role in shaping human life and culture.
In a rather old-fashioned anthropological tradition, we are introduced to the
'customs and traditions' of the locals, while immersed in the heat or cold,
humidity or aridity of their climate.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Having introduced visitors to the dynamism and agency of
climate, the museum proceeds to a second main section dealing with 'Climate
Protection'. Here we learn about the history of the sciences of climate change,
and about policy options for preserving the stability of current climatic
conditions. Somewhat predictably, the policy options on show mostly concern the
enlightened individual making rational changes to their personal behaviour. As
Fred Turner has shown in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo10509859.html"><i>The
Democratic Surround</i></a>, public exhibitions of
this immersive, multimedia sort have, in post-war western societies, often sought
to inculcate a particular kind of individualised democratic citizenship which
emphasises freedom of choice as both a right and a responsibility. Here,
this model of citizenship is extended to encompass individual responsibilities
for maintaining climatic stability.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Touring these exhibitions brought to mind Peter
Sloterdijk’s provocative arguments in <i><a href="http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745647685">In the World Interior of Capital</a></i>. A companion piece to his landmark <i>Spheres </i>trilogy, the text offers a
philosophical theory of globalisation which explores how the globe has figured
in western thought and practice. In a nutshell, Sloterdijk delineates three
phases of globalisation defined by: the mathematical rationalisation of cosmological
space enabled by Greek geometry, and the coeval interest in spheres as
ontological and aesthetic perfection; the terrestrial globalisation of the
early modern age, with its maritime voyages of discovery and colonisation; and
the period since 1945 of ‘electronic globalisation’, facilitated by new
technologies which render globe-spanning communications instantaneous. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">“What
distinguishes the three great stages of globalisation…are primarily their
symbolic and technical media: it makes an epochal difference whether one
measures an idealized orb with lines and cuts, sails around a real orb with
ships, or let aeroplanes and radio signals circulate around the atmospheric
casing of a planet.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
The second section of the book takes the figure of the
Crystal Palace, home of the Great Exhibition of 1851, as a metaphor for the
modernity brought about by this history of globalisation: the world interior of
capital. In this hothouse environment, the spoils of globalisation are brought
home, the moderns live in capitalist decadence, and the rest wait outside for
their turn to enter. The boundaries of the Crystal Palace are geographically
complex, made of discriminations, constituting a structure which, like Hardt
& Negri’s ‘Empire’,<o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vQ3BSfnjVhw/VZP27sOZVRI/AAAAAAAAMDM/C3e5CAbYWaM/s1600/DSC04475.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vQ3BSfnjVhw/VZP27sOZVRI/AAAAAAAAMDM/C3e5CAbYWaM/s320/DSC04475.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Klimahaus</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
“is not a coherent architectural
structure; it does not resemble a residential building, but rather a comfort
installation with the character of a hothouse, or a rhizome of pretentious
enclaves and cushioned capsules that form a single artificial continent”</div>
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
Climate has figured large in Sloterdijk’s recent thought.
His spherology project, concerned with the phenomenology of human spatiality and the construction of 'interiors' at multiple scales, has recently engaged with questions of climate change.
One of the outcomes of colonialism, Sloterdijk suggests, was the discovery of
the “world context”, meaning we now inhabit a “repercussion-infested
system”, as actions – such as emitting carbon – are seen to impact materially
on other people, beings and systems which may be spatially distant, but which
can be considered materially close. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GDkyD0w9E88/VX1jf2fiQxI/AAAAAAAAL_8/cBacEPmFUKk/s1600/DSC04490.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GDkyD0w9E88/VX1jf2fiQxI/AAAAAAAAL_8/cBacEPmFUKk/s320/DSC04490.JPG" width="320" /></a>The two main strands of Sloterdijk’s argument in the <i>World Interior</i> neatly map onto the two
main sections of the Klimahaus. In the first, we follow an ‘explorer’ boldly
setting out to discover spaces which do not belong to his own lifeworld.
Suitcase in hand, he embodies contemporary residues of the ‘<a href="http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631201114.html">Geography Militant</a>’
culture which Felix Driver argues can be detected in diverse discourses and
media, a long time hence from its Victorian apogee. The presentation of other
cultures as situated timelessly within particular spaces and climates, displaying
ahistorical ‘customs and traditions’, recalls much earlier modes of knowing and
representing the anthropological Other. Critical climate scholars have observed
how climate change discourses have allowed the re-animation of problematic
tropes such as these, in rebooted forms of thought like climatic determinism. Yet this voyage which museum visitors are invited to take is
decidedly modern, despite its arcane insinuations. It is thematic, concerned
with climate above all else, illustrating what Sloterdijk describes as a shift
from “great actions” to “great themes” in the transition away from the age of
terrestrial globalisation. Here, climate both divides and connects; it explains
difference, but represents too a common thread of material connection which is
offered in the following exhibition as a political injunction. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q9ovKjk2HI4/VX1j5-oOi1I/AAAAAAAAMBM/jmPtukxOt9k/s1600/DSC04536.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q9ovKjk2HI4/VX1j5-oOi1I/AAAAAAAAMBM/jmPtukxOt9k/s320/DSC04536.JPG" width="211" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
The ‘Climate Protection’ section offers climate not as an
exterior space to be explored, but as part of a modern interior which must be
carefully calculated and managed. The symbolic media of this calculation are many
and varied: the ice core, the computer model, the ‘personal climate account’. But
amid these calculative rationalities uncertainties proliferate, which are
domesticated through personal stories from the future offered by characters we
met on our first voyage. The climatic spheres to be found lined up along
8-degrees Longitude have been disrupted; families torn apart, livelihoods
disrupted, lives lost. Stability gone, the boundaries of the Crystal Palace are
made more indeterminate, not least as human migration enters the narrative as a
mode of ‘adaptation’. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-erOBIW0kU98/VX1kkO3vdkI/AAAAAAAAMCw/WdJGWlW-UbM/s1600/DSC04573.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-erOBIW0kU98/VX1kkO3vdkI/AAAAAAAAMCw/WdJGWlW-UbM/s320/DSC04573.JPG" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Proliferating statements from the climate bank</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
The setting of the museum itself is rich in suggestive symbolism.
It occupies a site on the quayside in what was once one of the hearts and
springboards of German oceanic expansionism. With the age of formal European
empires over, and notions of atmospheric globality firmly entrenched, the
quayside now plays host to climate as interior, rather than to those who,
suitcase in hand, once sought it as exterior. If enlightenment once began at
the docks, now we encounter something new; a gracefully bulbous glass and steel
construction which is home to both the Klimahaus, with its gathering together of the world’s
climates, and a Mediterranean-themed shopping mall, transporting consumers from
one maritime setting to another. Here, though, the Mediterranean climate does
not seem to have been simulated, just the aesthetics of a jumbled streetscape
in terracotta hues. For the warmth, one must buy a ticket at the Klimahaus, and
follow our explorer down to Italy. <o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CZLdaPu7Iok/VX1jOvaJBYI/AAAAAAAAL_M/1kZ0Nyldb2A/s1600/DSC04477.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CZLdaPu7Iok/VX1jOvaJBYI/AAAAAAAAL_M/1kZ0Nyldb2A/s320/DSC04477.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
Capturing something of "the drama of the
earth's disclosure as the carrier of local cultures” and its subsequent
“compression into an interconnected and foamed world context”, Klimahaus is a product of 20<sup>th</sup> century
atmospheric globality:<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h-LDBCdidp0/VX1jW4CNNjI/AAAAAAAAL_o/-YCP5ZS7SiE/s1600/DSC04486.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h-LDBCdidp0/VX1jW4CNNjI/AAAAAAAAL_o/-YCP5ZS7SiE/s400/DSC04486.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Climate control<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<br />
“no globe we have ever seen shows the earth's atmosphere. Two dimensional
maps likewise provide views of airless territories...It was not until the 20th
century that the atmosphere was added once more and the objectified conditions
for human milieu-connectedness made nameable.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<br />
20<sup>th</sup>
century explications of the atmospheric milieu can be traced, Sloterdijk
suggests in <i>Terror from the Air</i>, to
the rendering of the milieu as a military target in the first gas attacks on
the Western front in 1915. This process of progressive explication has also
seen microclimates come to figure as objects of control. Air conditioning, for
Sloterdijk, is much more than a domestic technology, but a variegated field of
human action whereby interiors of various sizes are conditioned to our
environmental whim, often benignly, promoting comfort; sometimes as a mode of
violence. But it is the more banal technologies of air conditioning which
allows the Klimahaus to gather together, or more accurately simulate, a
diversity of climates. If Sloterdijk’s epochal distinctions are founded upon
discrete ages’ symbolic and technical media, Klimahaus may be considered a
paragon of 21<sup>st</sup> century forms of globalisation. </div>
<div class="" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
</div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fsXynfV3YVE/VX1jPK2B1XI/AAAAAAAAL_U/o2VY5JcWFXc/s1600/DSC04480.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fsXynfV3YVE/VX1jPK2B1XI/AAAAAAAAL_U/o2VY5JcWFXc/s400/DSC04480.JPG" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Switzerland</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dQ4eR4E3sqE/VX1jKwD57uI/AAAAAAAAL_E/NO79wDbuYFE/s1600/DSC04481.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dQ4eR4E3sqE/VX1jKwD57uI/AAAAAAAAL_E/NO79wDbuYFE/s400/DSC04481.JPG" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stories from the mountains</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--iXfqBSHR2o/VX1jQ7H62aI/AAAAAAAAL_c/iAvsPUHcW_k/s1600/DSC04483.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--iXfqBSHR2o/VX1jQ7H62aI/AAAAAAAAL_c/iAvsPUHcW_k/s640/DSC04483.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Traces on the ice</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tltyICEOHBU/VX1jWmezoVI/AAAAAAAAL_k/WwC_OuG6WuM/s1600/DSC04485.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tltyICEOHBU/VX1jWmezoVI/AAAAAAAAL_k/WwC_OuG6WuM/s400/DSC04485.JPG" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Werner is re-scaled in Italy</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-17G2NvuiMSQ/VX1jaTcwBsI/AAAAAAAAL_0/q3m9oH5ZMhM/s1600/DSC04488.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-17G2NvuiMSQ/VX1jaTcwBsI/AAAAAAAAL_0/q3m9oH5ZMhM/s400/DSC04488.JPG" width="266" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BOZf5ZQNf38/VX1jiOmxdBI/AAAAAAAAMAE/TlSO_xlrMWg/s1600/DSC04500.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BOZf5ZQNf38/VX1jiOmxdBI/AAAAAAAAMAE/TlSO_xlrMWg/s640/DSC04500.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Heat of the desert</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DK1hmJbFezs/VX1jjHYn88I/AAAAAAAAMAM/OwkAeL19mi8/s1600/DSC04501.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DK1hmJbFezs/VX1jjHYn88I/AAAAAAAAMAM/OwkAeL19mi8/s640/DSC04501.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xmbjBbqTKXE/VX1jmYu3cNI/AAAAAAAAMAU/iKJPewg4oMk/s1600/DSC04506.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xmbjBbqTKXE/VX1jmYu3cNI/AAAAAAAAMAU/iKJPewg4oMk/s400/DSC04506.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kom21KrLU_Y/VX1jt48wTuI/AAAAAAAAMAc/ZtkyILoQynY/s1600/DSC04514.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kom21KrLU_Y/VX1jt48wTuI/AAAAAAAAMAc/ZtkyILoQynY/s640/DSC04514.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Exploring Antarctica</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I2NS-jja57A/VX1ju16q5gI/AAAAAAAAMAk/7xd5POFYVV0/s1600/DSC04521.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I2NS-jja57A/VX1ju16q5gI/AAAAAAAAMAk/7xd5POFYVV0/s640/DSC04521.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The roof of the world</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K5FBYQEAxMk/VX1jxdChbZI/AAAAAAAAMAw/Wz9rsxk6tdM/s1600/DSC04527.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K5FBYQEAxMk/VX1jxdChbZI/AAAAAAAAMAw/Wz9rsxk6tdM/s640/DSC04527.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tropical aesthetics</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NelNQsGUe6w/VX1jxcHLwzI/AAAAAAAAMAs/rJnCvQrgj_4/s1600/DSC04530.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NelNQsGUe6w/VX1jxcHLwzI/AAAAAAAAMAs/rJnCvQrgj_4/s640/DSC04530.JPG" width="426" /></a></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6AlU6O6YC2k/VX1j39FlrcI/AAAAAAAAMBE/64ZBKSGBeDA/s1600/DSC04531.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6AlU6O6YC2k/VX1j39FlrcI/AAAAAAAAMBE/64ZBKSGBeDA/s640/DSC04531.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rising seas and the vulnerable Hallig - see previous post</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H-ija0xWBIE/VX1j1oxxfWI/AAAAAAAAMA8/NZR522f2xj0/s1600/DSC04537.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="420" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H-ija0xWBIE/VX1j1oxxfWI/AAAAAAAAMA8/NZR522f2xj0/s640/DSC04537.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9LSbbckdRbk/VX1kBvDzz4I/AAAAAAAAMBY/ouv6RkMr7OE/s1600/DSC04543.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9LSbbckdRbk/VX1kBvDzz4I/AAAAAAAAMBY/ouv6RkMr7OE/s640/DSC04543.JPG" width="424" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wind energy pinball</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uVYEtKdFiRo/VX1kBCopZ4I/AAAAAAAAMBU/yfS-9mtODR4/s1600/DSC04545.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uVYEtKdFiRo/VX1kBCopZ4I/AAAAAAAAMBU/yfS-9mtODR4/s640/DSC04545.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If the sun stopped</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z9xKNauPDcE/VX1kBwu71MI/AAAAAAAAMBg/AHMgSm3Q-no/s1600/DSC04549.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z9xKNauPDcE/VX1kBwu71MI/AAAAAAAAMBg/AHMgSm3Q-no/s640/DSC04549.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antarctic exploration</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RXqY3XA5bco/VX1kL6uuU5I/AAAAAAAAMBs/CuPVWoSkK4M/s1600/DSC04550.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RXqY3XA5bco/VX1kL6uuU5I/AAAAAAAAMBs/CuPVWoSkK4M/s640/DSC04550.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ekB3NH7tTQI/VX1kMCwttrI/AAAAAAAAMBw/uc8txa5bjyA/s1600/DSC04552.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ekB3NH7tTQI/VX1kMCwttrI/AAAAAAAAMBw/uc8txa5bjyA/s640/DSC04552.JPG" width="424" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cycling</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5KOJGXaQNl4/VX1kL0xxevI/AAAAAAAAMB0/m8Y_nqOaa4w/s1600/DSC04553.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a>
<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-10083392668758635702015-05-18T05:25:00.000-07:002015-05-19T01:37:35.941-07:00Wer nicht will deichen, der muss weichen: a fieldtrip in Nordfriesland<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By Martin<br />
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Last Thursday Helen and I travelled with Werner Krauss and Dorle Dracklé to Nordfriesland to explore some of the places and politics that make up emerging energy landscapes in the region. Werner and Dorle are both anthropologists who have conducted work on the emergence of renewable energy systems across Europe. Werner in particular has had a long ethnographic engagement with the area which stretches north of Hamburg towards the Danish border; a land of salt marshes, wide open skies, migratory birds, farming communities, coastal trippers and wind turbines. Hailing from Norfolk, we felt an uncanny sense of familiarity in this otherwise strange landscape.<br />
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Much of the land on which one drives or walks around here is reclaimed from the sea. For centuries, people have used timber structures to capture sediments born on the tides, which eventually builds up into stable, fertile land which is excellent for crops, yet liable to flooding. Perhaps some of this land is made of sediment which once formed the eroding cliffs of north-east Norfolk on the other side of the North Sea. However, in recent decades, the establishment of a National Park has pitted nature conservation concerns against the interests of farmers keen to grow their land into the sea. The region supports a number of coastal ecosystems which conservationists are keen to protect from human interference, even though many of the ecosystems are themselves products of human artifice through land reclamation. Arguments were made that the human maintenance of much of the reclaimed land should stop, and that nature should be allowed to take its course of reclaiming space for the sea. Local communities, if they couldn't be permitted to reclaim more land, argued that they should at least be able to maintain the landscapes which have been established already. One such place is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_Hallig">Hamburger Hallig</a>, a piece of reclaimed land which is only partially protected from flooding but which, if the sea were given free reign, would soon disappear under the tides.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An historical map of the evolving coastline printed on the menu at the Hamburger Hallig restaurant. The long history of land reclamation is important to local residents, and represents a significant claim on the landscape in opposition to wildlife conservationists</td></tr>
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Werner has written about the struggles to define the boundaries between the 'natural' and the 'cultural' in these landscapes. He's suggested that in the difficult deliberations involved in, for example, defining the extent of the Wattenmeer National Park, disputes between competing groups have involved appeals to a nature that needs protecting or to a set of deep-rooted cultural practices which deserve preservation. Settlements have demanded both hard-won political compromise and the pragmatic definition of a boundary between nature and culture.<br />
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<i>Verspargelung</i><br />
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Over the last few years the inability to reinvest agriculturally-generated capital into a horizontal expansion of farmland has led to the growth of a new spatial fix in the form of wind turbines. Unable to grow laterally, farmland has grown upwards, harvesting the energy of the wind and taking advantage of generous government subsidies and feed-in tariffs. Little of this growth was motivated by an explicit concern about climate change. Initially the multiplication of wind turbines happened quite haphazardly, with little planning or coordination. Critics of the new aesthetics of wildly sprouting turbines spoke of <i>Verspargelung </i>- literally the asparagusisation of the landscape (anyone who's spent the springtime in northern Germany will know of the prominence of white asparagus). More recently, community conflicts over these rapid changes to the landscape have resolved into the creation of civic wind parks, whereby communities together invest in the construction of well-planned groups of turbines, with profits shared among the investors. Of course, there are still disagreements, and some areas have opted to keep wind farms out altogether, preferring instead to preserve the landscape in a pre-turbine state in a bid to encourage tourism.<br />
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Werner has written about the fascinating webs which tie together human and nonhuman actors in these landscapes, and which extend far beyond Nordfriesland. Historically, a lot of the capital which enabled the reclamation of land and the establishment of a Koog (like a Dutch polder) came from the German colonies. The Sönke-Nissen-Koog, for example, was built by the industrialist Sönke Nissen with wealth generated from diamond mining in modern-day Namibia, and the buildings on the land were designed and named to reflect these African links. Nowadays, capital flows in and out of the region as investors from other parts of Germany vie for the handsome returns which wind energy can yield, while wealthy local farmers snap up cheaper land in eastern Germany to expand their agricultural enterprises beyond the physical and regulatory confines of the Friesland coast.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Greens' have often been perceived very negatively in this region, even among those involved in producing wind or bio-energy. Conservation efforts have frequently conflicted with local landscape practices, and critics have detected an authoritarian streak in some environmentalist arguments.</td></tr>
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Interestingly, while debates have always concerned energy futures, social change, changing landscapes and human-nonhuman relationships, the idea of climate change has only recently come to feature. While some scientists have since sought to integrate considerations of climatic futures into local politics here, most notably through the provision of 'climate services' (i.e. locally tailored projections of future climate change), Werner has analysed these emerging energy landscapes as examples of what Bruno Latour calls <i>Dingpolitik </i>(literally, the politics of things). This perspective allows us to see the centrality of nonhuman objects to social relations, while also sensitising us to tacit debates about how the nonhuman should best be represented in political deliberations. It is a perspective which troubles to distinctions between nature/culture and science/society, and approaches topics like landscape conservation as collective 'matters of concern' as opposed to 'matters of fact'.<br />
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In Nordfriesland, certain things have long been the loci of important social relations. <i>Wer nicht will deichen, der muss weichen </i>is an old saying which roughly translates as 'Those who don't want to dyke, must go'. This points to the fact that the construction and maintenance of drainage and flood protection technologies were collective affairs, involving whole communities in unique relations of interdependence. Those who didn't play their part in properly maintaining a dyke could quite literally be expelled from a community, sent packing with just 24 hours' notice. More recently the coast - as an object of conservation - and wind energy technologies have been woven into new webs of conflictual social relations and entanglings of nature and culture.<br />
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You can read more about these entanglings in Werner and Dorle's work <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01426390903557972">here</a>, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2011.52509.x/abstract">here</a>, <a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472438614">here</a> and <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1586508/Coastal_Environment_made_Public_Notes_from_the_Field">here</a>. Below are a few more images from our fieldtrip.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Werner claims to have finally found the long-lost boundary between nature and culture - it's here, where the dyke separates Hallig and farmland, with a barrier controlling vehicle access. Continuing vehicle access to the Hallig, with its popular restaurant on its furthest point, has been a key point of contention for local residents.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boundaries abound</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fracking proposals have sparked a new wave of political discontent.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Flood waters frequently lap against the slopes of Schafsberg, one of Hamburger Hallig's small artificial hills</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wildlife knowledge to be had at the <a href="https://www.nabu.de/">NABU </a>information point on Schafsberg</td></tr>
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-60141235879646570112015-04-09T08:13:00.000-07:002015-04-10T00:19:39.564-07:00Media Cultures of Computer Simulation - visiting fellowship<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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by <a href="https://twitter.com/martin_mahony">Martin</a></div>
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I'll be spending the next couple of months as a Research Fellow at the MECS Institute in Lueneburg, Germany - the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation. It's a really interesting, small interdisciplinary group of scholars united by an interest in the transformations wrought by computer simulation on knowledge-making and forms of life, thus connecting with my interests in the role of climate simulation in the science and politics of climate change.</div>
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During my fellowship I'll be extending a project started over the past few months on the emergence and institutionalisation of climate prediction in the UK, focusing on the establishment of the Met Office Hadley Centre. I've called the project '<a href="http://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/mecs/en-personen/fellows/dr-martin-mahony.html#c384725">Resolution: regional climate modelling and the visibility of climate change</a>', as I'm particularly interested in the role that regional prediction, or the promises of regional prediction, played in the establishment of a close working relationship between the UK Met Office and what was then the Department of the Environment in the late 1980s and early '90s. I've long found regional climate modelling to be an interesting practice employed at the boundaries of science and politics, with the possibilities of high-resolution climatic information - often portrayed on maps designed to emphasise their superior realism compared to global models - seemingly offering a seductive way of coming to terms with how climate change might alter relations between climates and societies at local scales. </div>
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The more recent rise of so-called 'climate services' has extended this science-policy culture of high resolution prediction whose origins I want to trace. While I'm in the area, I hope to start mapping some of the simulation practices being employed by climate service providers in the Hamburg region, where a range of institutions have pioneered new forms of climatic expertise. To me, this is all part of a long and interesting story about the reconfiguration of expertise in governmental efforts to come to terms with environmental change. Although this history is often narrated as one of science becoming ever more certain while politics refuses to listen, dig a little deeper and there are interesting questions about how particular strategies for understanding climate change have been, as Simon Shackley and Brian Wynne put it in 1995, 'mutually constructed' by scientific and political actors.</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'll be at MECS until the end of May, but will soon be returning to Lueneburg to present some of my work at the conference <a href="http://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-26847?title=dealing-with-climate-change-calculus-catastrophe-in-the-age-of-simulation&recno=167&language=en&q=&sort=&fq=&total=692&page=9&subType=event">Dealing with Climate Change: Calculation and Catastrophe in the Age of Simulation</a> in June, which will bring together an international group of historians, philosophers and sociologists of science to consider "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.6399993896484px; line-height: 24.9599990844727px; orphans: 3; widows: 3;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">computer simulations as cultural techniques since they realign and reorganize not only epistemic communities but also intervene into social and (geo-)political orders". </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 24.9599990844727px; orphans: 3; widows: 3;">Shackley, S., & Wynne, B. (1995). Global climate change: the mutual construction of an emergent science-policy domain. Science and Public Policy, 22(4), 218-230.</span></div>
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-55116171044625367942015-02-04T04:16:00.001-08:002015-02-04T04:20:33.011-08:00Argument, Authority, Anxiety - special section of History of Meteorology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://artnaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/weather-man-vyacheslav-korotki-the-loneliest-man-on-the-planet-artnaz-com-8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://artnaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/weather-man-vyacheslav-korotki-the-loneliest-man-on-the-planet-artnaz-com-8.png" height="260" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(c) Evgenia Arbugaeva</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The <a href="http://meteohistory.org/scholarship/history-of-meteorology/history-of-meteorology-volume-6-2014/">latest volume of the journal <i>History of Meteorology </i></a>features a special section on 'Argument, Authority and Anxiety' in the atmospheric sciences edited by Ruth Morgan. It includes papers presented at a day-long symposium held as part of the<a href="http://www.ichstm2013.com/"> International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine</a> in Manchester in 2013.<br />
<br />
Taken together, the papers present an interesting narrative of the ambiguous place the atmospheric sciences have occupied in wider scientific and cultural landscapes over time, and of the anxieties atmospheric scientists themselves have felt about their professional credibility and authority. Papers range from Australian colonial meteorology and the use of weather knowledge by 19th century British insurance companies to more contemporary concerns about the politics of climate change and the role of scientists and scientific institutions in public debate. The collection includes some of my own thoughts on some of the recent controversies which have swirled around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).</div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-31049734826911716422015-01-16T09:01:00.001-08:002015-01-16T09:01:33.594-08:00New Year, New Job<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EEjrM3KDsNU/VLlBfk5QkeI/AAAAAAAAATA/5fdwXCWxouU/s1600/energy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EEjrM3KDsNU/VLlBfk5QkeI/AAAAAAAAATA/5fdwXCWxouU/s1600/energy.png" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
<i><a href="https://twitter.com/HelenPallett">By Helen</a></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I've been a bit quiet on this blog over the past few months, mostly because I was in the final throes of writing up my PhD thesis. I finally completed that task in December, and after a bit of R & R over the Christmas break I've now returned to the 3S research group at UEA as a senior research associate, looking at public participation in and around the energy system. Initially I'm working on the <a href="http://www.realisingtransitionpathways.org.uk/">Realising Transition Pathways</a> (EPSRC) project, following up on the <a href="https://publicsnetwork.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/making-energy-publics-third-event-in-our-travelling-seminar-series/">Making energy publics </a>workshop which I helped to organised in April last year. I'll produce a full report of the workshop soon and then we're hoping to write a review paper based on some of the themes of the workshop.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
Beyond this my main plans for the year are to get on with writing up some papers based on my PhD thesis, and to get back into regularly blogging about my work. I'm excited to get back into reading new literature and to learn more about energy politics. There are also a few pending bits of job news which I'll hopefully be able to share on here shortly.Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-56022832233174231272014-12-05T09:46:00.000-08:002014-12-05T09:46:17.978-08:00Life in the Anthropocene: reflections on a couple of recent talks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://m1.behance.net/rendition/modules/135847967/disp/16b6dd302253f14e9db386ff08153871.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://m1.behance.net/rendition/modules/135847967/disp/16b6dd302253f14e9db386ff08153871.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In</i> (2014) - <a href="http://www.davidgasi.com/">David Gasi</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
By <a href="https://twitter.com/martin_mahony">Martin</a><br />
<br />
A couple of talks I attended last week threw up some interesting links and comparisons, and offered some useful snapshots into the direction of travel among those interested in ideas about the Anthropocene and the nature of the human.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>First up was an event at the University of Westminster entitled <a href="http://www.davidchandler.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/FABE-SSH-Panel-Discussion-flyer_final.pdf">The Anthropocene: Architecture, Cities, Politics, Law, as Geological Agents</a> and jointly hosted by the Faculties of Architecture & the Built Environment and of Social Sciences & Humanities. Jon Goodbun, Tom Lloyd-Jones, Lucy Bond, David Chandler and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos all gave short reflections on what the (possible) designation of the Anthropocene means for contemporary thought. Jon Goodbun for example offered some interesting thoughts on Marx's notion of species-being. Lucy Bond reflected on the nature of memory, time and trauma, while Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos outlined how he sees the Anthropocene vindicating moves towards <a href="http://historyofthought.as.uky.edu/index.php/Flat_ontology">flat ontologies</a>, while calling for a recovery of a Spinozan situational ethics which recognises blurred boundaries between beings, collectivity, and imperfect forms of knowledge.<br />
<br />
I've found some of David Chandler's thinking on the concept of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/resi20/current#.VHyptDGsVCY">resilience </a>to be quite interesting, and he offered a similar take on the Anthropocene. Chandler identified a shift from a humanistic mode of thought, which posits an independent human concerned with managing 'external' conditions, to a post-humanist mode which redistributes agency to beings heretofore considered other - whether ecological or geological. This new metaphysics has, for Chandler, important political implications. He talked about the need to re-learn how to govern, but also how this could be achieved through recognition of the complex interwovenness of human and non-human forces in determining, for example, the outcomes of a disaster like a flood. He suggested that we are starting to recognise that now, rather than just building higher walls to keep the elements out, we need to exercise humility and a willingness to learn in the face of events and processes in which we are implicated, but of which we can never have perfect knowledge or capacities to anticipate.<br />
<br />
He dismissed those who critique the 'Anthropocene' as a totalising and inequality-denying concept as engaging in too-easy a form of criticism, and stressed that social inequalities have a growing relevance to disasters (once called 'natural disasters') which perhaps now surpasses their relevance to forms of direct human conflict. I wasn't convinced by all of Chandler's arguments, particularly his claims that questions of causality are now less relevant than questions of correlation, and therefore that intricate monitoring and Big Data can help us come to terms with, and respond to, shifting material conditions, transforming how we govern ourselves in the process. Understanding Big Data as a potentially transparent window onto material processes would seem to repeat some of the epistemological tricks which he dismisses as out-of-date humanism. Nonetheless, his thesis that the Anthropocene - as a performative political event as much as a geological category - is a moment of potentially transformative changes in the government of complex human/non-human systems, is an interesting one that I'm sure many would agree with.<br />
<br />
Later in the week I took in Nik Rose's seminar at the Cities group in King's College London Geography. Rose has recently been making the case that we are witnessing something of a transformative moment in the relationship between the biological and the social sciences. While the former is abandoning an asocial reductionism, the latter is increasingly engaging with questions of body, affect and vitality. Rose is positioning himself at this new epistemic intersection, and suggested in his seminar talk that social scientists need to abandon their "hermeneutics of suspicion" viz. the claims made by the biological sciences about the material underpinnings of emotional experience and social difference.<br />
<br />
Rose spoke about some of the work (and justifications) of the <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/sshm/research/Research-Groups/Biomedicine-Ethics-and-Social-Justice/BESJ-Projects/Urban-Brain-Lab.aspx">Urban Brain Lab</a>, which aims to explore the new spaces opening up at the boundaries of neuro-, bio- and social sciences. He and his team are interested in new developments in theories about epigenetics, neurogenesis, neuroplasticity and so forth, all of which point to how the expression of our genetic make-up can change as we move through life, in response to environmental stimulants. These developments are a radical re-casting of the so-called 'nature vs. nurture' debate, fundamentally blurring the boundaries between the two.<br />
<br />
Picking up where earlier thinkers like Baudelaire, Benjamin and Simmel left off, Rose is interested in mental life in the city - in how the urban experience quite literally gets 'under the skin', influencing our mental well-being and even our material constitution, and thus raising new questions about how and why mental illnesses are unevenly distributed across social space. Like David Chandler, Rose is sympathetic to ideas of resilience (unlike many in the critical social sciences), and is concerned with understanding the concept from the cellular to the societal scale - why is it that some people aren't as affected by the mental strains of urban life as others, and what can emerging biological sciences sciences tell us about the reasons for such differences?<br />
<br />
Rose is not interested in reducing affective experience to either biological or social processes. A lot of work has examined phenomena like stress and loneliness in urban settings but, rather than take these as objective things, Rose is concerned with how they are rendered into thought and experienced subjectively, and how they subsequently perhaps influence the ongoing re-making of the brain.<br />
<br />
Rose's work does not necessarily sit easily with those concerned about the history and residues of various forms of biological and genetic determinism in the understanding of social inequality and social change. All I want to comment briefly on now are some interesting resonances between Rose's thinking and broader debates about the Anthropocene.<br />
<br />
Both of the discussions I've described have highlighted how we are witnessing a period of boundary-blurring between the geologic, the human, and biologic. Discussions of the Anthropocene have revolved not just around the embedding of the human trace in geological strata, but also in observations about the material make-up of human bodies - about the increasing presence of 'artificial', industrially-produced proteins alongside 'natural' ones, for instance. The city has become something of an icon of the Anthropocene, especially in its visual discourses; the city's materialities contributing to an anthropogenic lithology of tarmac and concrete. But the city is a site where the human body and the human brain, as well as the earth, undergoes transformation, if we follow Rose's arguments. Lines of causality here are shifting. Once-straight arrows on conceptual diagrams are looping back on themselves. And if causation is the stuff of politics - praise, blame and intervention - then the shape of political possibility is perhaps also changing.<br />
<br />
Some find the Anthropocene a suffocating idea - we have woken up inside a cloying morass of biological and geological ambiguity, where neat categories of social and political thought are smeared across elongated time-scales and new conceptual maps of human-environment interactions. The very categories of 'human' and 'environment' have been woven into each other, challenging the conventional bases of both political and environmental thought. For some thinkers, the causes and effects of social inequality cannot be thought like they used to be. For others, the protection of an environmental 'out-there' can no longer be so neatly theorised and practiced. Personally, while not wholly sold on some of the arguments being hooked to the Anthropocene bandwagon, I'm sensitive to how political difference and human agency are currently being re-thought in interesting, if challenging, ways. These debates are certainly worth keeping a critical eye on, not least because there are some fascinating links emerging between new ways of thinking about urban life and planetary politics.<br />
<br />
<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-42502819026611533162014-12-03T09:12:00.000-08:002014-12-03T09:12:57.031-08:00The Tragedy of Climate Change - forthcoming public lecture by Joshua Howe at King's College London<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi3_8Ausgm0/VH9CnxwXGcI/AAAAAAAAL4Q/rkA8wX2KSEQ/s1600/wwf_eisfiguren_05__c__rosa_merk_wwf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi3_8Ausgm0/VH9CnxwXGcI/AAAAAAAAL4Q/rkA8wX2KSEQ/s1600/wwf_eisfiguren_05__c__rosa_merk_wwf.jpg" height="425" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(c) Rosa Merk</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
On January 7th the Department of Geography at KCL is hosting Joshua Howe for a public lecture on the history of climate politics in the US. Howe is the author of <a href="http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/HOWBEH.html" style="font-style: italic;">Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming</a>, and will be talking to the title: </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span lang="EN-US">The Tragedy of Climate Change:</span></b><span lang="EN-US">History, science, and the politics
of global warming in the United States</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's the abstract for the talk:</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'Author
of the recent book <i>Behind the Curve</i>, Joshua Howe uses the narrative lens
of tragedy as a way to make sense of our collective failure to mitigate global
warming in a meaningful way. He tells the story of rising CO<sub>2</sub>
– illustrated by the now famous Keeling Curve – through a variety of historical
contexts. In so doing Howe highlights
the ways in which the well-intended efforts of scientists and environmentalists
to use more and better science to shape global warming policy have at times
undermined the political ability to implement solutions. Although science is essential to understanding
global warming, a primary and often exclusive focus on science in public
discourse has left advocates for progressive climate change policy vulnerable
to political opposition. This is the
tragedy of climate change.'</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Vlad Jankovic, historian of science at the University of Manchester, will offer a response, before we move to a wine reception. The talk is free to attend and open to all, and registration can be completed here: </span></span><a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-tragedy-of-climate-change-tickets-14189277511">https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-tragedy-of-climate-change-tickets-14189277511</a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<div style="text-align: left;">
It's set to be a really fascinating talk, and Howe's take on the role of scientists as advocates for political action will be of interest to anyone concerned with the politics of climate change.</div>
</div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-1286565529325952462014-08-21T02:08:00.000-07:002014-08-21T02:30:39.479-07:00New paper on the 'burning embers'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
By Martin<br />
<br />
My analysis of the history of the IPCC's 'burning embers' diagram has now been published in <i>Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers</i>. I've written a short <a href="http://blog.geographydirections.com/2014/08/20/the-production-and-circulation-of-climate-change-knowledge-science-expert-judgement-and-the-visual-image/">post for the <i>Geography Directions </i>blog</a> which offers an introduction to some of the themes which the paper addresses. A little while ago I also wrote a blog post which put the IPCC's new version of the diagram in historical context: <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/red-mist-descending-curious-history-of.html">see here</a>. Below is the new paper's abstract:<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.env.go.jp/en/focus/jeq/issue/vol06/image/topi01c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.env.go.jp/en/focus/jeq/issue/vol06/image/topi01c.jpg" height="182" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The updated embers (right), showing risks and impacts <br />
associated with different warming scenarios (left).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Geneva, Verdana, Helvetica, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">The challenge of meaningfully communicating an issue like climate change has vexed those trying to convey the risks, probabilities and uncertainties of the impacts of climate-warming greenhouse gases. This paper investigates the history of one such effort – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) so-called ‘burning embers’ diagram. This colourful visual rendering of global ‘reasons for concern’ has had a chequered institutional and publication history – embraced by some, rejected by others, and used by yet others to argue both for and against the reality of a global threshold where climate change becomes ‘dangerous’. Through interviews and documentary analysis I reconstruct the production and circulation of this diagram in the cultural circuits of climate science, policy and advocacy. I suggest that the notion of ‘objectivity’ is spatial in origin, concerned with distance and visual perspective. As a practice and performance, objectivity is also found to be situated within particular cultural and political formations. In applying these arguments to the history of the burning embers, I narrate a geography of objectivity concerning the visual composition of particular subject–object relations, and of contestation over the practice and objectivity of ‘expert judgement’ as the diagram circulates and encounters actors with diverse interpretive commitments and political objectives. Although excluded from the IPCC's 2007 report after governmental objections, the diagram has continued to haunt climate change debates. I suggest in closing that geographers of science pay greater attention to the visual image and to how norms of scientific conduct are performed and contested through the production, circulation and reception of visual knowledge. This would in turn enable geographers of science to supplement the interest in circulating knowledges with insights into situated interpretations of the meaning of science itself.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Geneva, Verdana, Helvetica, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This paper represents the last main empirical publication from my PhD thesis which means that, aside from a review article and a couple of related book chapters currently in preparation, I can now turn my attention to other things, like my developing project on colonial meteorology and histories of scientific internationalism in the British Empire, which I'll try to blog about soon. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Publishing in <i>Transactions </i>always means an extra-stringent review process, and the paper was undoubtedly improved by the feedback of the reviewers and the editor, so my thanks to them. Thanks also to all those who I interviewed as part of the project, whose recollections and explanations were crucial in making sense of this fascinating episode in the history of climate change science. It is a story which is still unfolding, with the IPCC Working Group II having published an updated version of the diagram (pictured), and negotiations underway on the contents of the overarching Synthesis Report - the document in which the first embers appeared in 2001. Hopefully I'll be able to follow-up on these latest developments in due course.</span></div>
</div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-87006396091097856702014-06-04T04:40:00.000-07:002014-06-05T07:52:39.460-07:00New paper: 'The geographies of the conference'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/3601710-3x2-340x227.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/3601710-3x2-340x227.jpg" height="213" title="Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-26/small-protest/3601754" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Protesting the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Ruth Craggs and I have a new paper out in <i>Geography Compass </i>which reviews existing work on the political and cultural geographies of conferences in politics and science.<br />
<br />
The collaboration emerged from the discovery of a shared interest in conferences as sites of knowledge production and political action, where the micro-geographies of social interaction collide with broader geopolitical or cultural forces in the pursuit of agreement, consensus or dissent. Conferences play an important part in the rhythms of both science and politics, and we thought it would be interesting to put these spheres next to each other in order to tease out some commonalities. Of course, conferences often do this work of conjunction themselves, with conferences on issues like climate change frequently bringing together individuals from the very different social worlds of science and politics into the same room, with fascinating consequences.<br />
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The paper builds on some of Ruth's work on the history of Commonwealth conferences and my own work on the politics of climate change. We're hoping to continue this line of thinking through the theme with which we end the paper - the role of international conferences as foci for particular forms, strategies and geographies of political protest. More on that in future. The abstract for the paper is below, and the article can be accessed <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12137/abstract">here</a>.<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Geneva, Verdana, Helvetica, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Geneva, Verdana, Helvetica, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><i>Conferences are an ubiquitous and important part of political and academic life, acting as key sites of knowledge creation, public performance, legitimation and protest. Reviewing the current literature and drawing on our own work, this paper suggests that geographers are well-placed to provide insight into conferences through the concepts of visibility, performance and space. We explore the politics of academic, climate and geopolitical conferences, focusing on their production of epistemic communities and their role as sites for the performance of ideological positions and identities. We then explore international summits as protest spaces. We draw attention to a number of scales in our analysis, suggesting the need to attend to the global, national, local and micro-scale of conferences to ask what space and location contribute to conference outcomes and how conferences in turn act back on the landscapes in which they are embedded. We conclude with four reasons why we believe that conferences provide a fruitful – and important – focus for research in geography.</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Geneva, Verdana, Helvetica, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-10633849166986597322014-04-08T05:54:00.001-07:002014-04-08T06:51:09.635-07:00Red mist descending: the curious history of the IPCC's 'burning embers'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cvpwbmwi_9M/U0PQNlwXCFI/AAAAAAAAAW4/Mlndx_V9a2U/s1600/cut+embers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cvpwbmwi_9M/U0PQNlwXCFI/AAAAAAAAAW4/Mlndx_V9a2U/s1600/cut+embers.jpg" /></a><br />
By <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/p/martin.html">Martin</a><br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I wrote a short paper (<a href="http://spontaneousgenerations.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations/article/viewFile/16075/15616">here in PDF</a>) with Mike Hulme discussing the evolution of the IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 'reasons for concern' diagram, which became colloquially known as the burning embers. I'm now putting the finishing touches to a longer paper on the production and circulation of the diagram, and how it's become a prominent part of the visual culture of climate change. Last week, a new chapter opened in this story with the publication of the IPCC's Working Group II report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. As with previous updates to the diagram, the headline is: "it's worse than we thought".<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>Origins</b><br />
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The burning embers began their life in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report in 2001 (see the right hand side of the figure below). The diagram was used to illustrate the growing risks associated with five 'reasons for concern' (RFC) as global mean temperature rises. The RFC framework was put together to give readers a way-in to the discussion about what might constitute 'dangerous' anthropogenic climate change, the very thing which the UN climate policy architecture is designed to avoid (UNFCCC Article 2). The five RFCs are 1) risks to unique and threatened systems; 2) risks from extreme climate events; 3) distribution of impacts; 4) aggregate impacts; 5) risks from large scale discontinuities. The authors of the diagram assessed the scientific literature across these categories, and placed the colour transitions in the vertical columns at the temperature where they thought the risks shifted from 'virtually neutral' to somewhat negative or low risk, and then to more negative or high risk.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OHaCwfxZ-sg/U0PJhcSz6YI/AAAAAAAAAWY/_S9hlMptVSA/s1600/Fig+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OHaCwfxZ-sg/U0PJhcSz6YI/AAAAAAAAAWY/_S9hlMptVSA/s1600/Fig+1.jpg" height="372" width="640" /></a></div>
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On its publication in 2001, the diagram became something of an icon of the climate change debate. Set next to projections of global temperature change, it offered a means of quickly reasoning about the kinds of risks which different warming trajectories might involve. However, the diagram wasn't without its detractors. In the 2001 review process, some government reviewers in particular queried the subjectivity of this approach to compiling and communicating policy-relevant information (especially the US Government), while the Government of Germany by contrast worried that the diagram located negative impacts too far out into the future.<br />
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<b>Defining danger</b><br />
<br />
Addressing the question of the meaning of 'dangerous' climate change is rife with epistemic, political, ethical and cultural indeterminacies. Exercising 'expert judgement' of information deemed relevant to that question is also something which places scientists in a potentially awkward position at the boundaries of epistemic and normative styles of reasoning. Is it possible to draw a clear division between judgements of the strength of evidence, and judgements of the severity of risks? If such a division is possible, is it possible to communicate it? The blurry colours of the diagram were in part a way of communicating some of these indeterminacies, including uncertainty both about the magnitude of future risks, and about our ability to make defensible judgements about what those risks actually mean.<br />
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The burning embers diagram has moved in and out of the IPCC structure throughout its history. In 2004, Mike Mastrandrea and the late Steve Schneider reproduced the embers in a paper which offered a quantitative analysis of the chances of avoiding dangerous climate change. The blurry colour transitions described above, specifically those from yellow to red, were taken as data points representing the onset of danger.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/graphics/MastandreaSchneider2004_0001LG.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/graphics/MastandreaSchneider2004_0001LG.png" height="400" width="277" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Climate/Climate_Impacts/WhatIsTheProbability.html</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Not long afterwards, the same chapter which produced the original embers was re-mandated for the next IPCC report. The RFC framework was updated textually, but an updated version of the diagram produced later on in the process was left out of the high-profile Summary for Policymakers following tense negotiations at a government plenary. Steve Schneider wrote in his autobiography:<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">‘The main opposition comprised officials representing the
United States, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Some scientists from other
countries thought the diagram's bright orange gradients of levels of risk from
increments of warming were too subjective. In its place the report used written
descriptions of levels of risk. Because words are less powerful than a
colourful, iconic chart, many from Europe, Canada, New Zealand, and small
island states demanded to include it...the four big fossil-fuel dependent and
producing nations opposed it.’ (<i>Science as a Contact Sport</i>, 2009. See also Andy Revkin's account <a href="http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/why-2007-ipcc-report-lacked-embers/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1">here</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn16729/dn16729-1_1162.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn16729/dn16729-1_1162.jpg" height="240" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16729-earth-may-be-entering-climate-change-danger-zone.html#.U0PIe_ldWSo</td></tr>
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The updated diagram was eventually published in a paper in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Science</i>, with the new analysis appearing alongside the 2001 version for comparison. One can immediately see how the assessment of the RFCs has become more serious, with high risks appearing at lower levels of temperature rise. The diagram can be (and has been) critiqued for offering global mean temperature as the chief variable determining the impacts of future changes. Of course, temperature increases will likely vary a lot across space, and people's experiences of weather and climate - dangerous or otherwise - are shaped by a lot more than temperature. However, in 2009 the diagram began to be used to articulate arguments about the 2-degrees temperature rise target (see below), with some claiming the diagram shows the target is too high, while others suggested the diagram highlights the target as a pragmatic policy choice. The meaning of the imposition of a 2-degrees guardrail over the embers' fuzzy colour transitions is very much in the eye of the beholder.<br />
(A historical note: the 2-degrees target and the embers diagram arguably share a common ancestry in the form of a 'traffic lights' diagram of global temperature rise prepared by Dutch scientists in the late 1980s).<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qO8Z845FanM/U0PM65FsgnI/AAAAAAAAAWk/gFJ2GYXplxk/s1600/Fig+5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qO8Z845FanM/U0PM65FsgnI/AAAAAAAAAWk/gFJ2GYXplxk/s1600/Fig+5.png" height="248" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, (c) University of Copenhagen</td></tr>
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<b>Purple haze</b><br />
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Which brings me to the IPCC's latest analysis. The trend of a descending red mist has continued, although this time an ominous shade of purple has been added to the colour palette, to indicate "very high risk". The purple is most prominent in the 'unique and threatened systems' column, with the report citing threats pertaining to Arctic sea ice, coral reefs, glaciers and species extinction as the chief concerns at temperatures beyond 2-degrees (for full explanations for the colour transitions, see page 37-46 in the Emergent Risks and Key Vulnerabilities chapter).<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wMJyT7ULZPA/U0PB61g1CxI/AAAAAAAAAWA/OPLg-c6udLM/s1600/embers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wMJyT7ULZPA/U0PB61g1CxI/AAAAAAAAAWA/OPLg-c6udLM/s1600/embers.jpg" height="400" width="332" /></a></div>
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The appearance of purple on the chart is reminiscent of the maps made by Australian meteorologists during last year's heat wave, when they simply ran out of colours to symbolise the high temperatures. For Damien Carrington in the <i>Guardian</i>, this was "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2013/jan/08/australia-bush-fires-heatwave-temperature-scale">a sign of things to come</a>". The burning embers diagram is a fascinating set of signs and symbols for things to come, and its history raises challenging questions about not just the effective communication of risk, but also about the role of expert judgement and the boundaries between objective and subjective assessment - questions which the IPCC has had to perpetually negotiate. Such questions appear to have been live at the plenary session where the report summary was approved by governments. Much negotiation appears to have revolved around the inclusion of certain temperature thresholds on the diagram, corresponding to policy targets like limiting warming to 1.5- or 2-degrees. In the end, as the diagram grew cluttered with opposing policy preferences, the UK Government "proposed removing all dotted lines so as to appear scientifically neutral"(see the IISD report of the meeting <a href="http://www.iisd.ca/download/pdf/enb12596e.pdf">here in PDF</a>).<br />
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The burning embers diagram has arguably contributed to the increasing prominence of a risk framing of climate change in IPCC reports, which James Painter has commented on <a href="http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/04/the-ipccs-risky-talk/">here</a>. Some might recoil at this framing, as 'risk' in other areas of environmental politics has often been used as a means of turning complex struggles over values, interests and uncertainties into problems which can be known and managed in an often undemocratic and technocratic way (see e.g. this piece by Andy Stirling <a href="https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=stirling-article-in-nature-on-uncertainty.pdf&site=25">in PDF</a>). But that's a much broader debate. What's also interesting about the new manifestation of the burning embers is that it has also morphed into a version which tries to portray how different levels of societal exposure and vulnerability affect the levels of risk to be faced, along with the risk pathways which different socio-political scenarios might set us on (see below). So while previous iterations of the RFC framework have only accounted for the potential of autonomous adaptation to climate change (i.e. that which occurs in response to stimuli other than knowledge of climate change), here a whole new set of societal variables have been brought into play.<br />
<br />
The burning embers thus becomes a map for various forms of human intervention in (and management of) the climate and conjoined socio-ecological systems. Whereas the early embers simply mapped the impacts of human greenhouse gas emissions on societies and systems passively awaiting their climatic fate, now the diagram tries to mediate between different forms of human agency and adaptability, and between different forms of knowledge and control. The version reproduced above from the Mastrandrea and Schneider paper is an early illustration of this tendency. It's interesting how the story of the diagram is one of blurry colours interacting with straight lines, as various actors have taken the deliberately fuzzy background and superimposed various trajectories and targets. The version below is perhaps the most complex of this particular genre. It remains to be seen whether these new versions will become as mobile, and perhaps as adaptable, as their predecessors.<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-30836408938969915682014-03-18T07:10:00.000-07:002014-04-24T12:24:12.533-07:00Presenting my PhD research - conference schedule summer 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZU8QmkZrJ_s/UA6HN7PlvmI/AAAAAAAAADg/qbOA8UXAHmc/s1600/SDN+presentation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZU8QmkZrJ_s/UA6HN7PlvmI/AAAAAAAAADg/qbOA8UXAHmc/s1600/SDN+presentation.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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By <a href="https://twitter.com/HelenPallett">Helen</a><br />
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In an attempt to get as much feedback as possible on my PhD work whilst I write it up, and to take advantage of cheap conference fees for graduate students, I've developed a fairly ambitious conference schedule for the summer. The titles and abstracts for my various talks below give a decent outline of the main elements of my PhD work. I'm dipping my toe into a few new disciplinary contexts as well to see how I fit in at the British Sociological Association and at a political science department, partly with a view to helping me work out what to do post-PhD and where I might want to be based in future. If you are going to be around at any of these conferences and would like to meet up - give me a shout! <br />
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<b><a href="http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/bsa-annual-conference.aspx">British Sociological Association Annual Conference</a> April 23rd</b><br />
Contested objects: evidence, publics and boundaries in open policy-making<br />
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Despite its prominence in British politics as a key rhetorical device for politicians and organising principle of civil service reform, the object of open government (or open policy) remains highly contested and ill-defined. This term has been interpreted both as a threat and an opportunity by advocates of institutionalised attempts by government and scientists to engage citizens in knowledge and decision-making. Drawing on detailed qualitative research using interviews, document analysis and participant observation, this talk will investigate attempts by actors in and around the government-funded public participation body ‘Sciencewise’ to adopt this dominant discourse to their advantage and to become actively involved in processes of meaning-making and boundary work around the term. Informed by an understanding of the intellectual, political and geographical roots of these most recent commitments to openness in policy and science, the challenges, tactics and motivations of pursuing commitments to democratic engagement through this new object will be discussed. This empirical analysis will feed into a broader exploration of how the object of open government has been translated and become embedded in different contexts, and what its effects are in these diverse settings. To bring up-to-date the now familiar story of the shift from public understanding of science to more institutionalised ‘upstream’ engagement in the UK, the talk will conclude with an assessment of what the current political fashion for ‘openness’ might mean for the future of institutionally orchestrated attempts to involve citizens in science and science policy. <br />
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<b><a href="http://www.westminster.ac.uk/csd/events/new-perspectives-on-the-problem-of-the-public">New Perspectives on the problem of the public </a>May 15th, 3pm</b><br />
Producing the publics of UK science policy: public dialogue as a technology for representing, knowing & constructing publics<br />
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The twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of increasingly institutionalised methods for public involvement in and engagement with policy-making, especially in the domain of science policy. In the UK Government context, the arm’s-length body Sciencewise, funded by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills has been a central part of this institutionalisation of public participation. Since 2004 Sciencewise has been promoting and supporting the use of ‘public dialogue’ processes to involve public voices and concerns in live science policy decisions, through partnerships with government departments and research councils. Drawing on the critical vein of scholarship in science and technology studies which is beginning to engage with the institutionalisation of public participation (e.g. Braun & Schultz, 2010; Irwin, 2006) this paper will explore the organisational and political contexts of Sciencewise’s public dialogues. It will describe the emergence of public dialogue as a method or technology for representing and producing knowledge about publics, and discuss how the meanings and practice of public dialogue within Sciencewise have changed over the last decade. The paper will then argue that public dialogue both shapes and is shaped by existing policy orders and commitments, constructions of the public, and definitions of the policy problem under discussion. Such relational perspectives on publics and public participation are necessary for providing a more critical account of how governments represent, know and construct public voices in policy-making, and what consequences these different technologies might have.<br />
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Braun, K., & Schultz, S. (2010). “ ... a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements. Public Understanding of Science, 19(4), 403–419.<br />
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Irwin, A. (2006). The politics of talk: Coming to terms with the “new” scientific governance. Social Studies of Science, 36(2), 299–320.</div>
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<b><a href="http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sdn/">Science and Democracy Network</a> Annual Meeting, June 30th - July 2nd</b><br />
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Institutional experiments for democracy and learning: the
case of Sciencewise, UK<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Increasingly disconnected from its origins in the laboratory,
‘experimentation’ has become a metaphor used to describe a variety of forms of
knowledge-making and governance. This paper explores the analytic resources
provided by the use of the metaphor of ‘experimentation’ to describe both
democratic practices and processes of institutional learning. In the context of
the study of democracy, experimentation evokes a sense of being constantly
in-the-making, trialled and re-trialled to find moments of epistemic and
political settlement. With reference to institutional learning processes,
experimentation similarly implies an open-ended interaction between norms,
values and practical experience. Using the case study of the UK Government-funded
body Sciencewise, which supports and advocates public participation processes
around science policy, institutional experiments in learning and democracy will
be described, including: an experiment in developing methods for horizon
scanning for future science and technology policy challenges; experimentation
around the creation of a community of practice for civil servants interested in
public participation; and attempts to become involved in defining elements of
UK government discourse around ‘open policy’. It will be argued that studying
such processes as experiments or instances of experimentation helps us to
understand their relevance to democratic practice and learning, and to be
conscious of their broader institutional and political effects in the ongoing
re-making of British democracy. The paper will end with a consideration of how
the metaphor of experimentation could be used to further aid capacities for institutional
reflection and reflexivity in the democratic governance of science. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><a href="https://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm">RGS-IBG Annual Conference</a> Co-producing socio-technical futures panel August </b><br />
Co-producing UK science policy futures: imaginaries, organisational learning & public participation<br />
<br />
Socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009) of potential futures are a vital component of organisational learning processes, both constructing and being altered by everyday organisational practices and understandings. This talk will explore organisational learning processes within the Sciencewise programme, an arm’s-length body funded by the UK Government Department for Business Innovation & Skills which orchestrates ‘public dialogue’ projects around key science and technology policy decisions. Taking inspiration from Macfarlane’s (2011) ‘learning assemblages’, learning is understood to be the co-production of socio-technical imaginaries with codified forms of organisational knowledge, technical objects, and everyday organisational routines or assumptions. Imaginaries relating to the open policy/open science agenda, implicit beliefs in the societal goods provided by scientific and technological progress, and the fear of future public controversies around certain areas of science and technology, among others, have both shaped and been influenced by several organisational learning processes from within and around the Sciencewise programme. Drawing on in-depth qualitative fieldwork, the talk will examine the role of public participants in shaping, being enrolled into or even being co-produced themselves by certain imaginaries of the future, alongside the co-production of such imaginaries with more mundane and bureaucratic aspects of the Sciencewise programme. The talk will end by calling for a rejuvenated politics of socio-technical imaginaries at the science-policy interface and beyond, which recognises the diverse material and social implications of such imaginaries and emphasises the need for further empirical exploration of the (organisational) spaces through which they are constructed and contested.<br />
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Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119–146.</div>
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<br />
Macfarlane, C. (2011). Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell</div>
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<b>RGS-IBG co-production of co-production panel August</b><br />
Co-producing the participatory co-productions of UK science policy<br />
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Procedures for citizen involvement in science policy decision-making have become a common if not institutionalised part of UK Government structures and practices. One of the principal institutions coordinating this ‘co-production’ of science policy is the arm’s-length body Sciencewise, which is funded by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills and supports ‘public dialogue’ projects around important forthcoming science policy decisions. This paper will argue that these public dialogue projects are not only an instance of ‘making policy together’, but are also co-produced relationally with visions of the future, policy and organisational commitments and structures, problem definitions, and publics themselves. This will be illustrated through an exploration of the construction, orchestration and broader effects of a public dialogue and knowledge exchange process which Sciencewise oversaw in 2013, concerned with identifying new and emerging science policy issues. The multiple products of this process can only be grasped with attention to the political and organisational contexts and the subtle inclusions and exclusions of the public dialogue exercise, alongside procedural details. It is thus necessary to attend to the relational co-production of such forms, rather than seeking to only understand what happens within the processes themselves.</div>
Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-7581444078800150612014-03-07T03:55:00.000-08:002014-03-07T03:59:13.004-08:00Exploring the future-conditional with Pinterest<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I've recently been developing an interest in how speculative futures are visualised, particularly regarding the relationships between climate change and urban change. I came to this topic through my participation in a workshop on climate-induced migration discourses at the University of Bremen, the proceedings of which will soon be published as a collective, extended working paper. I spoke about the <a href="http://www.postcardsfromthefuture.co.uk/">'Postcards from the Future'</a> project which used digital photographic montage techniques to create images of a future London ravaged by ice, heat, water and - in quite regrettable ways - human migrants.<br />
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The images got me thinking about the nature and political aesthetics of montage. As Marcus Doel and David Clarke argue in a <a href="http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d436t">2007 paper</a>, montage is a pervasive epistemic and aesthetic practice, which "produces and exceeds matters of fact. In each and every domain, that which is given is given through an assemblage of views, an assemblage whose cuts ensure that what is given remains open". I'm particularly interested in how the 'assemblage of views' brings together distant places in a kind of spatial juxtaposition, for example in images of <a href="http://www.london-futures.com/2010/10/15/parliament-square-rice-paddies/">paddy fields in Parliament Square</a> or <a href="http://www.london-futures.com/2010/10/04/buckingham-palace-shanty/">shanty houses crowding around Buckingham Palace</a>. It strikes me as interesting how certain visualisations of climatic futures claim to reach though time by reaching across space, thus revealing particular geographical imaginations about the nature of social change, about human-environment relationships, and about forms of alterity and difference.<br />
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To further explore this genre of future-conditional imagery (if x, then y...) I've start a Pinterest 'pin-board' to collect together some example (see <a href="http://www.pinterest.com/mwfmahony/future-conditional/">here</a>). So far these range from the 'Postcards' mentioned above to advertising images, maps of potential flood levels, screen shots from films, and a few historical examples of images of imagined futures or of transported spaces. It's this historical collection which I'm most interested in developing, in order to provide some cultural-historical context for the current proliferation of images of urban destruction, social transformation and environmental decline.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/db/f7/b2/dbf7b20d83b184d5e4ef6f85db8aa918.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/db/f7/b2/dbf7b20d83b184d5e4ef6f85db8aa918.jpg" height="320" width="254" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An advert for 'Bile Beans', an Australian cure-all medicine, c. 1900</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm hoping that the Pinterest board will eventually become a 'population sample' on which I can base a written analysis. I'm currently reading Peter Sloterdijk's '<a href="https://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745647685">In the World Interior of Capital</a>' and there are some striking resonances between this genre of image and his ideas about the political anthropology of globalisation, about representations of distant spaces in the 'interior' world of capitalism, and about the exclusions and partitions that define the political and representational economy of contemporary forms of order.<br />
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So if you come across any images which fit with all of this, let me know!</div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-69884241351842580692014-02-21T02:34:00.002-08:002014-02-27T07:00:17.883-08:00Bruno Latour on war and peace in a time of ecological conflicts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By Martin</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Update: audio and video now available <a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2270">here</a></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Bruno Latour
delivered a lecture at the London School of Economics last night in which he
outlined some of his recent thinking on the relationship between science and
politics in a time of accelerating environmental change and policy stagnation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Latour has
cut an interesting figure in the climate debate in recent years. A key target
of attacks against ‘relativism’ and irrationality in the 1990s ‘Science Wars’,
he has since speculated as to whether the insights of science studies
concerning the social constitution of scientific knowledge have inadvertently
contributed to the ‘artificial extension’ of the debate over the reality and
severity of anthropogenic climate change. More recently, Latour has sought to
cast himself as an ally of the climate scientists and the activists who seek a political
solution to climate change. He even related last night how climate scientists,
in France at least, have even started to seek out his advice on how to conduct
a ‘debate’ against a well-funded, smartly coordinated campaign to sow doubt and
ignorance about the causes and consequences of climate change.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To hear him
speak last night was, then, an interesting opportunity to hear his thoughts on
what science studies scholars might contribute to the politics of climate. His
offering, which he has largely outlined elsewhere (see <a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/165">here</a> and <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3emruAAACAAJ&dq=reflexive+modernity+heinlein&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wCYHU7WZCOWQ7AahnYDQDw&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA">here</a>) and relates closely to his
<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SdkTmQEACAAJ&dq=modes+of+existence&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2SYHU82FKYfY7AbX0IGQBw&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA">most recent book</a>, is not straightforward. In true Latourian style, it calls for
a fundamental re-orientation of one of modernity’s most fundamental tenets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Latour has always enjoyed military metaphors. For him, the
persistence of a spurious climate debate between two sides is rendered possible not by an assault of the forces of irrationality on the politically
agnostic territory of science, but by a split between two different camps –
those who cling to the idea of a sharp distinction between science and
politics, facts and values, and those who value a new ‘political epistemology’
which recognises the interdependency of science and politics in the ongoing
rational and democratic ordering of a common world. The climate warriors, of
both stripes, are perhaps united only by their preference for the modern ideal
of facts amputated from values. This is the settlement of the moderns, of the
Holocene. The repertoire of ‘science versus politics’ – of policy dependent on
scientific certainty, of a perfectly linear relation between knowledge and
action – is what is to blame for questions of physical causation and
probability becoming political battlefields. Science can legitimate the claims
of policy advocates, while the inevitable uncertainties and complexities of the
climate render climatology an easy target for those who recognise or believe
that attacking the epistemic can short-circuit the struggle over the normative.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Latour thus
called for a ‘science <i>with</i> politics’. He argued that climate scientists
have been forced, by the <i>institution</i> of Science, to fight the deniers
with one arm tied behind their backs as they shelter behind the Maginot Line of
epistemology, which pluckily yet hopelessly separates <i>is </i>from <i>ought</i>.
What if they could respond to charges that the IPCC is a ‘lobby’ by saying
‘yes, it is a lobby. A lobby for what kind of agents must be taken into account
in political discussions of how we want to re-make the common world. You [the
accuser] are a lobby too. How about showing us exactly what it is that you
would like to see retained or remade in the common world?’ The cry is for
‘cards on the table’ – an argument along similar lines to that of Mike Hulme in
his book <i><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Why_We_Disagree_About_Climate_Change.html?id=Ro33o5cvXcwC&redir_esc=y">Why We Disagree About Climate Change</a></i>. Climate change is about the very relations we have with
other humans and the material world which surrounds us. It can only be both
scientific and political. Separating the one from the other weakens both.
Countering the power of the oil-funded lobbies means recognising that we’re all
a lobby for a particular kind of world-in-the-making. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Latour ended
with some interesting reflections on the politics of the Anthropocene and the
transformations of space and time wrought by the re-cognition of the Earth and
of the need for a grounded politics of the <i>geo</i>. This connects with
recent arguments in critical human geography for a re-visiting of the <i>geo </i>of
geopolitics (e.g. <a href="http://progressivegeographies.com/2013/01/17/earth-rethinking-geopolitics/">here</a>). He riffed for a while on the recent blockbuster <i>Gravity</i>,
which for him represents the crumbling of modern utopianism (in the form of
crumbling space stations) and the gravitational pull of a metaphysics of
earthliness, of home or Gaia, of re-worked horizons and of the sand between
Sandra Bullock’s fingertips in the closing scene. He quipped that the rarefied
environment of outer-space is perhaps the only place where the ideal of
scientific distance and detachment has worked according to plan, as a few
carefully selected individuals strained against the pull of an earth which now
surrounds and enfolds. The resonances with Peter Sloterdijk are striking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn3.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/gravity-last-scene.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://cdn3.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/gravity-last-scene.png" height="160" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Welcome to the Anthropocene. <br />
Still from <i>Gravity. </i>Warner Bros. Pictures.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Some may
find Latour’s call for a new political epistemology, even a new metaphysics,
either unhelpfully vague, impractical, or downright dangerous. Ceding the
territory of hermetic rationality to ‘science-with-politics’ may, in some eyes,
risk poisoning the ideological well of climate politics even further. But for
me, it gets at the need for climate policy advocates to stop worrying quite so
much about the ‘sceptics’. The sceptics are right that climatic certainty is
elusive. But they are wrong that that should mean that climate politics is
impossible. The phenomenon of climate scepticism, at least in its most nakedly
ideological and orchestrated form, is, for me, the result of a bad settlement
between climate science and politics, not a cause of it. Latour’s suggestive
argument, while characteristically inattentive to the specificities and
complexities of climate politics, is a helpful way to start thinking how we
might reorganise the relationship between scientific knowledge and political
action. Although I find the ‘cards on the table’ argument itself a little
utopian in its Habermasian appeal about ideological clarity, there is something
important here about embracing, without fear of irrationalism, the </span><i style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">politics </i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">of
the climate. Scientific knowledge is vital to such debates about the material
complexities of the Anthropocene, but the claustrophobia of this posited
geologic epoch demands recognition of the false and ultimately unhelpful
distance constructed between modern science and politics. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">P.S. LSE are following-up this event with </span></span><a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/events/events.aspx" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">a talk next Thursday</a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"> by </span></span><span style="line-height: 18.399999618530273px;">similarly</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"> prominent German sociologist Ulrich Beck. </span></span></div>
</div>
Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-78582727461461535082014-02-10T03:39:00.002-08:002014-02-10T03:39:33.313-08:00New paper - 'Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface'By <a href="https://twitter.com/HelenPallett">Helen</a><br />
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I am very excited to announce that my first official publication from my PhD has <a href="http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/06/0309132513518831.abstract">appeared online</a>, in Progress in Human Geography. Entitled 'Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface', it is a review paper which synthesises insights from my early literature reviews on organisational learning and reflexivity. It's been a long process (almost 18 months) between initial submission and publication, during which my supervisor and I have refined and streamlined the argument of the paper a lot, hopefully making it more relevant and interesting to geographers with diverse interests. I'll offer a short summary of the paper below and try to outline where I think it can contribute to the current debate. If you don't have access to the journal and would be interested to read my paper then do get in touch.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The central argument of our paper is that organisations are not stable, bounded objects, but rather they are networked, co-produced and constantly 'in-the-making'. This means organisational change does not necessarily result purely from internal organisational processes managed from the top of the stated organisational hierarchy or structure. Instead we must also be attentive to how change might result with more ambiguous intentionality from external influences, from other parts of the organisational structure, and from more informal conversations and processes going on around and through the organisation. Furthermore, we suggest that organisational change and learning processes are often partial, open-ended, uni-directional and multi-vocal, rather than distinct and coherent mode switches as often assumed.<br />
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In the context of organisations at the 'science-policy interface', the chosen focus for the paper, this has implications for how researchers study, intervene in and work within such organisation (from government departments, to advisory bodies and universities themselves - there are a huge variety of roles that academics play in this context). We suggest a number of conceptual and practical resources which might be useful in these multiple engagements with organisations in the making, which can help us recognise and work with the networked and often messy realities of organizational change.<br />
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The conceptual avenues we suggest in the paper include: the approach of studying or working within contrasting organisational spaces which sit within and across any given organisational network; being attentive towards the potential importance of 'shadow spaces' or more informal organizational processes; exploring the production, maintenance and contestation of particular visions of the future within different organizational spaces and their interactions with learning and everyday practice; and even abandoning the notion of a singular 'science-policy interface' altogether as an object of study. On the level of method we suggest that these insights about the nature of organizations and organizational change should motivate constant reflection about the role of the researcher in such contexts, and furthermore might offer support to other calls for more 'messy' and intervention oriented (even experimental) research methods.<br />
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Much of the work I did on this paper is now feeding into the literature review chapter of my thesis which I am currently writing, though in this context I will be focussing much more closely on organizations involved in orchestrating public participation exercises. Inevitably since writing the paper I have come across further compelling academic work on organisations and learning (perhaps most notably Colin McFarlane's excellent book, Learning the city), and have also started thinking about different aspects of learning and change. For example, I think there will be more focus in my thesis on how particular models, information and understandings move between different spaces and are translated or codified in certain ways. Another avenue I hope to explore further, which is hinted at at points in the paper, is the notion of experimentation which I am increasingly seeing as central to my conceptualisations both of learning and of democracy.<br />
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I hope those of you who take the time to read the paper enjoy doing so, and as always I'd be grateful for any comments, questions or suggestions for future reading.Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-2705192594663358742013-12-06T02:47:00.002-08:002013-12-09T02:15:36.647-08:00Endings: politics, future, world<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/p/martin.html">Martin</a>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.steveboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/tracks01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="240" src="http://www.steveboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/tracks01.jpg" title="From http://www.steveboy.com/blog/?p=1407" width="320" /></a>While Helen has spent much of the last month <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/a-month-of-thinking-and-writing-about.html">thinking and writing about democracy</a>, I've been working through a quite random selection of texts as I go about developing some new research projects. These include Amanda Machin's <i><a href="http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/node/11831">Negotiating Climate Change</a></i>, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's <i><a href="http://www.akpress.org/afterthefuture.html">After the Future</a> </i>and Timonthy Morton's <i><a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects">Hyperobjects</a>. </i>They are all connected with my broad interest in the cultural politics of the future and the mediation of imagined futures through the physical sciences. All of the books either present or challenge particular endings, so I thought it might be interesting to consider them alongside each other, despite them all residing in very different intellectual traditions.<br />
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Amanda Machin's important new book engages with Chantal Mouffe's agonistics - a political theory which emphasises the irreducibility of conflict in democratic societies and calls for modes of political engagement suited to the inevitability of disagreement. Rather than seeking forms of consensus which by definition exclude and marginalise dissenting voices, leading to antagonistic eruptions outside of mainstream political processes, Mouffe argues for a politics which recognises disagreement as a precondition of decision. Developing these ideas in relation to climate change, Machin argues that consensus has been positioned as both a starting point and ambition of climate politics at multiple scales. By rendering climate change as a problem of individual behaviour or morality, or as a physical problem requiring a technical solution, the ideological contours of our relationships with the nonhuman and our preferred ways of ordering society are suppressed. Contrary to those who warn of politics getting in the way our heeding the warnings of science, Machin argues that it's only by letting dissensus back in that we can hope to achieve meaningful political decisions. Not everyone will agree with these decisions. But a 'conflictual consensus' on the mode of making such decisions, through agonistic debate, will at least give them a fighting chance of achieving what they are designed to do.<br />
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Machin's work is an important contribution to a growing critique of the depoliticisation of climate change. From Mike Hulme's exploration of why we all disagree about climate change to Erik Swyngedouw's pointed critique of the post-political condition, this body of work challenges the dominant ways in which the climate challenge has been framed as an issue which transcends ideological difference and contestation. Machin too bemoans the potential of climate change to put a stop to democratic politics, either through an elitist discourse of techno-managerialism or through more radical calls for <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change">the suspension of democracy</a>. Like Gert Goeminne (whose work I've discussed in an earlier post <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/anatomy-of-denial.html">here</a>), Machin sees climate 'scepticism' as an outcome of depoliticisation; a symptom of a bad science-policy translation, rather than a cause of it. A properly agonistic politics of climate change would invite dissenting voices back into the debate about the kind of world we want to live in, potentially relieving the ongoing politicisation of science, while healthily re-politicising climate politics.<br />
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'Bifo' Berardi's <i>After the Future </i>is concerned with the broader cultural politics of the future, and particularly with the demise of the Western civilizational faith in the future as the <i>telos </i>of progressive modernity. He paints the 20th century as the century which trusted the future, with early avante-gard movements like the Futurists cementing a dominant discourse of technological optimism and Whiggish history. Bifo, a media activist and Marxist theorist, also traces 20th century futurism through the annals of the labour movement and the faith that existed among capitalism's staunchest opponents in some kind of eventual Hegelian resolution of the contradictions of capital and labour. He identifies the 1970s as the decade when this all started to fall apart. When the punks cried "No Future" in 1977, they were channelling a new alienation from the sense of ever-improving social and political conditions. As neoliberalism subsequently took advantage of the 70s' economic crises, hard-won economic and civil rights began to be eroded and the precariousness of labour re-emerged; apparently its natural state rather than a temporary condition pre-existing progressive amelioration.<br />
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With the current crises of financial markets, the new dominance of 'semiocapitalism' where cognitive labour on signs has displaced bodily labour on physical materials, and the growing awareness of ecological crisis, the future has disappeared as an object of hope or activism. Art has, for Bifo, become concerned with ironic commentary on contemporary conditions rather than utopia (or even dystopia). The precariousness of cognitive forms of labour is having profound psychological impacts on workers, and it is unclear what forms resistance should take when processes of selection between alternative futures depend less and less on the exercise of human will. Withdrawal and autonomy seem the most propitious responses. "Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion" (p154).<br />
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In <i>Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World</i>, literary theorist and philosopher Timothy Morton draws on the object-oriented ontology (OOO) and speculative realism of people like Harman, Meillassoux and Negarestani to argue for the existence of hyperobjects - things like climate change which are inherently nonlocal, viscous, temporally unstable and generative of new forms of space and time. Drawing on the OOO notion that objects are inherently 'withdrawn' from human sensing, he argues that hyperobjects like climate change cannot be known in their entirety but rather only through the traces which they make in their interaction with other objects. The phenomenal traces of hyperobjects will depend on the medium through which they are encountered, much like how the same shoe will leave a different footprint in dry sand or wet mud. Like Atsara's light art installation <i><a href="http://atsara.site.free.fr/site%202010%20anglais/page_installations_eng.htm">[M]ondes</a>, </i>recently on show at Durham Cathedral as part of the Lumiere Festival, hyperobjects become sensible interobjectively, in a space of aesthetic interrelationships between the properties of different objects (for a video, see <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgTMvLVJQdc">here</a>).<br />
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A key element of Morton's argument is the end of the world. Not the world of objective existence, but <i>world </i>as a particular ontology - "a significant, bounded, horizoning entity...an aesthetic effect based on a blurriness and aesthetic distance". Knowledge of hyperobjects disturbs dominant cosmologies which assume neat distinctions between foreground and background, 'over here' and 'over there', Nature and Culture, space and time. The <i>world </i>of the romantic artist and of the environmental activist has disappeared as the concept of Nature has been emptied of any ontological significance.<br />
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"Likewise, as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a flimsy, superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much larger phenomenon that is strictly invisible. You can't see or smell climate. Given our brains' processing power, we can't even really think about it all that concretely. At the very least, <i>world </i>means significantly less than it used to - it doesn't mean 'significant for humans' or even 'significant for conscious entities'" (p104).<br />
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Essentially, the Heideggerian concept of <i>world </i>and its ontotheological positioning of humans as the most important entity is now untenable. Hyperobjects reveal the fragility of existence, the impossibility of a metalanguage which can stand outside and above hyperobjects, and the 'weakness' in the visible gap between thing and phenomenon.<br />
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Morton's work was my first exposure to OOO and I'm still processing the implications for such styles of thought for my own work, which is informed by constructivist epistemologies and a more relational ontology. There are some interesting linkages with Bifo's work, which deals with what we might call the hyperobjects of capitalism and ecology, and specifically their appearance in the aesthetic realms of art, media and political activism. Bifo is similarly concerned with the warping of senses of time and the future. Both authors recognise the disappearance of a singular Future, to be replaced with a more ambiguous stretching out of the present and all its inherent uncertainties and contradictions. For Bifo, the Future is no longer a guiding force. For Morton, neither is Nature. We might say that both understand the Future, as a cultural imagination in the present, as an aesthetic effect of hyperobjects.<br />
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Machin's work too deals with the disappearance of a guiding force, namely consensus. Or rather, she argues for the desirability of such a disappearance. Like the Future, consensus offers false promises of unity, coherence and inevitability. The 20th century faith in the Future painted everyone as a participant and beneficiary of the inexorable march towards a better world, even as capitalism perpetuated the structural violence of inequality. Machin's point is that a politics of consensus is similarly illusory, offering itself as rational and inclusive while at the same time fostering inequalities of voice and opportunity. Machin's radical democracy is, I think, an appropriate response not just to the current political impasse around climate change, but also to the ontological conditions described by Morton. We need a politics which can deal with the fact that climate is deceptively complex and pervasive, and reveals itself to people in different ways and through different material and ideological lenses. Climate change can't be dealt with through meta-languages of technical management. Morton argues that we have woken up inside the belly of a beast - a metaphor which aptly captures his decentering of the human and the impossibility of an outside-looking-in. Machin's prescription would also claim to be an antidote to the alienation and disenchantment diagnosed by Bifo - a form of politics amenable to the development of new subjectivities in contrast to the deadening hand of political and cultural consensus.<br />
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Although these three books all coming from very distinct philosophical positions, I'd suggest that they're all relevant for the re-thinking of climate politics. Throwing them together like this was more of an experiment in textual montage than an argument for any fundamental coherence across the three pieces, and there are certainly huge tensions. But they all contribute to how we make sense of the cultural politics of the future, and to how we can render the future a space of contestable alternatives.<br />
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"We sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future."<br />
- Bifo, Manifesto of Post-Futurism<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-75968637130202523702013-11-25T09:08:00.003-08:002013-11-26T03:27:33.627-08:00 A month of thinking and writing about democracy<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uaaVh7mjSdM/UpN0-4UlLSI/AAAAAAAAAOI/crUQDkptSdI/s1600/whats-the-big-deal-about-democracy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uaaVh7mjSdM/UpN0-4UlLSI/AAAAAAAAAOI/crUQDkptSdI/s320/whats-the-big-deal-about-democracy.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image credit: <a href="http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/cappe/conferences/conferences/whats-the-big-deal-about-democracy">University of Brighton</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I've been doing a lot of writing elsewhere this month, so it's been a bit quiet on the Topograph. This is partly because of my position as a <a href="http://blog.geographydirections.com/our-news-editors/">news editor</a> on the Royal Geographical Society's Geography Directions blog, which involves writing posts twice a month which relate current news stories to perspectives from papers in the archives of the RGS journals. It's been a great experience so far, but can sometimes sap my energy for other writing. I've also been commissioned to write a few extra posts by some other research blogs who have picked up on my work.<br />
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Though there was no clear project or agenda in my head when I was working on these different posts, I realise now that I have unwittingly been working through some of my thoughts about the nature of the democracy and representations of 'the public'. And this has in turn been very helpful in redrafting a paper I am about to submit to a journal, focussing on democratic practice. So this post is my attempt to synthesise and crystalise some of these thoughts for your perusal and responses and with one eye on my thesis write up which will start in January.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>My perspectives on democracy have been strongly shaped by the time I spent studying with STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff, and her constant reminders that democracy is what W. B. Gallie would have called an essentially contested concept. That is a concept which is widely used and recognised with a basic definition holding together its users, but its ultimate meaning is vague and contested, with no agreement on its essential components. Therefore I am not concerned with holding up ideals of democratic practice, against which to assess the government practices I study. Rather I am interested in democracy as an object struggled and contested over in multiple contexts - constantly being made and remade by those who strive for it, and those making claims to democraticness.<br />
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I tried to bring this stance out in<a href="http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=1779"> this piece </a>I wrote for the Democratic audit blog about attempts to institutionalise practices of public participation in UK science policy (this piece was also later re-posted on the <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/11/21/sciencewise-citizen-engagement-evidence/">LSE Impact blog </a>framed more as a story about the use of 'evidence' in policy making). I described different developments within the organisation Sciencewise - the government's public participation body which runs public dialogues around decisions in science policy - as a series of experiments in democratic engagement, each trying to improve on the last in an attempt to grapple with the complex and shifting terrains of UK citizens and science policy.<br />
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I have also been trying to bring a similar form of analysis to bear on the recent debates around open government and open policy. In a <a href="http://www.3s.uea.ac.uk/blog/windows-boundaries-difficult-questions-what-can-academics-add-open-policy-debate">piece</a> for my research group's blog, the Merton Stone, I talked about the potential for the discourse of open policy, which has been taken up strongly by parts of the British government, to create space for the development of more radical and inclusive forms of democracy. I argued that whilst the idea of open government has offered a useful way in to policy discussions for civil society actors and advocates of more 'direct democracy', its still ambiguous and contested defitinion is both an opportunity and a danger to such groups; where government claims to openness may be made against a very different set of assumptions and goals, and could act to close down other possible forms of democratic practice.<br />
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I offered a similar caution in<a href="http://blog.geographydirections.com/2013/11/15/how-new-is-the-new-openness/"> this piece</a> on the Geography Directions blog where I warned academics and other analysts not to assume the existence of novel democratic practices without further empirical study of the 'new openness' of open data, open access, crowd sourcing and the rest. Drawing on earlier scholarship around the decline of localism in the late 1990s, the post argued that innovations in democratic practice often display more continuities than differences despite the radical potential of new practices and technologies.<br />
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In another Geography Directions <a href="http://blog.geographydirections.com/2013/11/04/immobile-phone-geographies/">post </a>I used the example of the mobile phone to illustrate how new technologies simultaneously have the potential to empower and enrich personal freedoms, as was discussed around the Arab Spring, but also to enable forms of control and surveillance, as illustrated by the recent NSA revelations and other news stories.<br />
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The final strand of my various writings this month has been to think about the various techniques which governments use to know their citizens in the name of democracy. In <a href="http://blog.geographydirections.com/2013/10/18/the-public-says-mobilising-opinions-and-publics/">this post</a> on the Geography Directions blog I explored how techniques like public opinion polling and focus groups are used to create certain stable representations of public views and attitudes, with diverse impacts. I argued that these techniques create representations which are highly conditioned by the framing of the issue and the choice of method, and that they can be used both to bring out the 'public voice' and hold government actors to account, but also to close down or even close off areas of public debate.<br />
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I developed this argument in my <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/participation-now/helen-pallett/knowing-your-citizens-making-publics">most recent post</a>, which is part of the new partnership between the comment site openDemocracy and the Open University project Participation Now. In this piece I explored how different kinds of publics are created and mobilised through diverse techniques for knowing about citizens, from protest to opinion polls or public dialogues, around the issue of fracking. I argued that it was not possible or helpful to identify the technique which offered the best or truest representation of UK citizens. Rather it is more important to be aware of how all of these publics have been conditioned by the techniques which made them and to anticipate how they might be taken up to empower, exclude and transform in various political struggles.Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-90983970848289007162013-10-29T04:43:00.002-07:002013-10-29T05:12:57.299-07:00Social media strategy for early career researchers<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from pandodaily.com</td></tr>
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Yesterday I ran a course for PhD researchers in my faculty offering some insights into how they could use social media to develop their academic profiles. As part of running this course I spent some time gathering resources from other academics together and developing some of my own perspectives on social media use for early career researchers, so I thought I would share these here while it is still fresh in my mind. So here's my two pennies worth! You can also access the handout I developed for my session which includes links to other relevant information on social media use for academics <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JnemXad2PxjWGEhHiXQzDBy0Hs-8x2_SNVtrcgm6ANg/edit?usp=sharing">here</a>.<br />
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<li>It supports and enriches traditional academic activities, from paper writing and promoting, to academic networking or finding conferences and events</li>
<li>It is a way to help your work reach new audiences whether they are policy-makers, practitioners, members of the public or simply people outside of your immediate field, and increasingly it can help to open up data sets and other parts of the research process</li>
<li>Social media capabilities and a strong online presence may increasingly become a necessity for academics, especially as old publishing models struggle or are superseded </li>
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As an aside for early career researchers in particular, I have found that social media use and blogging can be a useful way of bridging the awkward first few years of any academic career where you have little or no publications but still want to share your work and ideas with others. It has also helped me to keep abridge of developments in the universities sector as a whole and the politics of particular departments in a way that did not used to be possible for early career academics. And finally it has been a great way of connecting to other PhD students and benefiting from peer support networks when dealing with difficulties in my PhD. </div>
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Potential pitfalls of social media use for academics include:</div>
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<li>Issues with data privacy and (over)disclosure</li>
<li>Time management and procrastination</li>
<li>Effort and resources needed to maintain social media platforms</li>
<li>The risk of experiencing bullying and abuse online</li>
<li>A lack of support and recognition for time spent engaging with social media</li>
<li>Buying into a broader political economy of knowledge production and transmission which requires you to give vast amounts of data over to private companies. </li>
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To help the participants in my course to come up with their own personal social media strategies, I used the social media honeycomb from <a href="http://busandadmin.uwinnipeg.ca/silvestrepdfs/PDF06.pdf">this paper</a> by Kietzmann et al which is actually aimed at businesses rather than academics. What I think is good about the honeycomb is that it highlights the different decisions you need to make when planning a social media strategy. For example, the extent to which you want to give details about your self and your personality, whether you just want an accessible online presence or whether it is important to be able to share and receive information or have conversations with other users. I also suggested a further set of dimensions which academics might like to add to this honeycomb, including: how much you want to link your social media use to your specific subject area; whether you only want to share information and talk about your specific research project or issues of broader relevance; to what extent you might also want to reflect on academic life and practice; and how much information you want to give about different parts of the research project you are doing. Asking yourself such questions can help you to work out which social media platforms are the best for you, and can also help you develop your own distinctive voice and approach. </div>
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To help the participants think through what they wanted to get out of their social media strategies I suggested a few academics who I think have very successful but also very different strategies, including <a href="https://twitter.com/alicebell">Alice Bell</a>, <a href="http://progressivegeographies.com/">Stuart Elden</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/JennyRohn">Jennifer Rohn</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog">Jon Tennant</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/DALupton">Deborah Lupton</a>. I also should have included masters student <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonIanCook">Simon Cook</a> in this list, who published a <a href="http://jographies.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/pinterest/">fantastic blog post</a> on his experiments with social media on the morning I gave the class. </div>
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Some of the participants in my course were disappointed that I didn't give any more concrete advice on developing a social media strategy. This is partly because I was trying to make the point that there is no formula for using social media as an academic - it depends on your subject area, your personal skills and resources, and what you want to get out of your social media use. But it is also because it was the first time I had run the course and I didn't know exactly what people would be hoping to get out of it. So if I was pressed to give guidance on developing a social media for early career researchers, this is what I would say:</div>
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<li>Try to find other people in your field who are using social media - this will show you which social media platforms are mostly commonly used by the people you want to interact with, and once an initial connection has been made it will be a quick way of finding other relevant friends, contacts, followers, etc. to become part of your network</li>
<li>Set up a google scholar profile. This is a basic page where you can add your papers and track citations and is an easy profile holder for people trying to find you online</li>
<li>Give twitter a go. In my opinion this is the most versatile social media platform so can be good for trying different strategies out and will allow you to connect with others very quickly. In my experience this is a good way of finding out what other social media platforms might be useful for your work and finding other researchers whose social media strategy you want to emulate</li>
<li>Set up one profile page on a specialist academic social media platform - Academia.edu and Researchgate are the most popular. This allows you to upload details about your publications, talks, slides and blog posts as well as giving basic information about your institution and previous work. I have also found this can be a good way of connecting with more established academics who are less likely to use sites like twitter.</li>
<li>Learn from other users, and constantly think about what this means for your own strategy - can you emulate how that researcher promoted her blog post through twitter and got lots of feedback from other researchers? Can you use pinterest in a similar way to a researcher in a related field, or can you transfer his strategy to a similar platform such as scoop.it or bundlr?</li>
<li>Remember what it is that you were hoping to get out of social media use. You aims and motivations are likely to change as you discover more about the platforms you are using and interact more with other users, but reflecting on your aims can help you stop wasting time maintaining a sparse and unpopular Flickr account when what you actually wanted to use social media for was connecting with other researchers in your field, or getting feedback on the work you have been doing on your literature review. </li>
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Any comments or feedback on this material would be greatly received. I'll hopefully be running the course again, so will be working on improving it in the meantime. </div>
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Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-8560504856615675712013-10-04T06:29:00.000-07:002013-10-04T08:14:50.090-07:00New paper, new job, new projects<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's been a bit quiet on here from my side over the summer, mostly because I've been working on finishing off and handing in my PhD thesis. I trailed some of my arguments at a few conferences during the summer, including the RGS-IBG in London, the annual Interpretive Policy Analysis conference in Vienna, and the International Congress for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Manchester. I managed to hand my thesis in on 20th September, just in time to start a new post at King's College London (see below).<br />
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My thesis is structured around a range of case studies which are in various stages of publication as journal articles (see e.g. <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718513001218">here </a>and <a href="http://spontaneousgenerations.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations/article/view/16075">here</a>). My work on the recent evolution of the science-policy interface in Indian climate politics has recently been published in <i>Social Studies of Science. </i>The paper traces the story of a mistake concerning the likely melting of Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 IPCC report, and analyses the emergence of the new Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment around 2009 and 2010. The latter event offered an important context for a re-assertion of epistemic sovereignty in Indian climate politics, which I argue was closely intertwined with former environment minister Jairam Ramesh's attempts to re-align India's stance in the global climate negotiations during the same period. From a long-standing position of resisting binding emissions cuts, Ramesh and the Indian government began to embrace voluntary approaches to emissions cuts and strategic alliances to countries like the US. I suggest that new, predictive knowledges of national territory provided an important anchor for Ramesh to navigate the choppy waters of shifting political sovereignty. In this way, I suggest that regional climate models have come to occupy an important place in a longer history of state knowledge-making (see <a href="http://intl-sss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/09/25/0306312713501407.abstract">here</a>).<br />
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<i>New job</i><br />
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<a href="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1002527/thumbs/r-KCL-COCAINE-large570.jpg?6" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="133" src="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1002527/thumbs/r-KCL-COCAINE-large570.jpg?6" title="Huffington Post" width="320" /></a>This week I took up a new post as a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at King's College London. This will allow me to continue some projects which have spilled-over from the PhD, and to work with Mike Hulme - now Professor of Climate and Culture at King's - on developing some new research ideas. We're looking to make some connections with people at King's and elsewhere in London who are interested in the cultural politics of climate and the anthropocene, to enact some conversations and see what happens. Based on my first few days of meeting people, I'm excited about the prospects for future projects, events and ideas.<br />
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<i>New projects</i><br />
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Part of my job will be to follow-up on some projects which spilled over the edges of my PhD. To start with, I'm working on a workshop paper on visual iconographies of climate change-induced migration. I'm interested in the different modes of visual representation employed in projects like <a href="http://www.postcardsfromthefuture.co.uk/">Postcards from the Future</a> and the <a href="http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/projects/published-projects/global-migration/reports-publications">Foresight report</a> into environmental migration, particularly how such representations tap into historical imaginations of, and anxieties about, urban change and decay.<br />
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I'm also hoping to get to work on a paper which will attempt to re-conceive the notion of 'geographies of science' in a way appropriate to contemporary politics of knowledge, risk and expertise. This will build upon some of the arguments made in my thesis, but will require some broader reflections on the epistemic geographies of various objects of political debate, like genetic modification, nanotechnology and biodiversity.<br />
I'll also be working on some ideas about anthropocene 'origins stories', along with Helen and some colleagues in Sweden. We hope this will soon spawn a paper, and maybe a subsequent workshop or conference.<br />
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So, lots to do, watch this space for updates!<br />
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-88808185645977912682013-07-23T04:40:00.003-07:002013-07-23T04:40:41.697-07:00'Society in the Anthropocene' - Reflections<div>
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Trinity_Test_Mushroom_Cloud_12s.jpg/484px-Trinity_Test_Mushroom_Cloud_12s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Trinity_Test_Mushroom_Cloud_12s.jpg/484px-Trinity_Test_Mushroom_Cloud_12s.jpg" width="257" /></a>A few weeks ago Martin and I attended the 'Society in the Anthropocene' conference at the University of Bristol, hosted by the <a href="http://www.bris.ac.uk/cabot/">Cabot Institute</a> and the journal <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/reso20/current">Economy and Society</a>. More information about the conference, including recordings of many of the talks, can be found <a href="http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/events/2013/206.html">here</a>. There is a forthcoming special issue in the journal Economy and Society which will feature many of the papers from the conference. It was a very interesting and enjoyable conference, with a line-up of top academics that read a little bit like an undergraduate geography syllabus - many of my formative academic heroes were there. In this post I will offer some reflections on the conference, following up on the posts that <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-anthropocene-reflections-on-concept_12.html">Martin</a> and <a href="http://thetopograph.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-anthropocene-reflections-on-concept.html">I</a> wrote back in April.</div>
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Perhaps what was most striking about the conference was the diversity of accounts of the Anthropocene which were offered. The presenters chose variously to bring capitalism, modernity, the military, medicine, agriculture, climate change, politics, ethics, the urban, aid, technologies of environmental impact assessment and human reproduction into the frame in their accounts of the anthropocene. The top cited theorists at the conference were Arendt, Foucault and Latour, though they were rarely cited by the same people. Zizek, Sloterdijk and Haraway also garnered quite a few citations. But again, though I dare say such theorists have been cited together in the past, they are hardly natural bed fellows. There were also differences in the narratives of the Anthropocene offered, with huge variations in temporality (prehistoric to twentieth century), causality (industrialisation, to changes in awareness, to alterations in human biological processes) and focus.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image credit. www.gambassa.com</td></tr>
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One the most obvious fault lines between the different accounts offered of the Anthropocene centre around the relationship between the human and the non-human. Some speakers chose to emphasise the entanglement of the human and non-human (e.g. Gisli Palsson) and evoke the Latourian/Callonian collapsing of the nature/culture boundary (e.g. Erik Swyngedouw) as Martin discussed in his previous post. These speakers detailed numerous connections between humans and non-humans, from human involvement in global level environmental processes like climate change down to the micro-level organisms and objects which are implicated in the processes within our bodies which are necessary for human life. In contrast to this, other speakers felt it was important to retain the nature/culture distinction and to emphasise that the blurring of the human and non-human is not universal but rather highly contextual. For example, Nigel Clark (for a paper similar to his talk see <a href="http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/rock-life-fire(8e05716a-701b-4159-bccc-b8455e22d3bc).html">here</a>) argued for the need to accept the existence of deeply inhuman processes, such as geological processes.<br />
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Another clear point of disagreement at the conference concerned the role of social scientists and humanists in relation to natural scientists and engineers. The conference had been explicitly set up to give social scientists a space and a platform to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene on their own terms, and to develop distinctively social scientific concerns and approaches to its study. I suspect this resonated with a wider feeling that social scientists are all too often viewed as the junior partner in their collaborations with their natural scientist colleagues, and there were strong arguments made that social scientists should not be simply accepting and working with natural science framings of the Anthropocene. Whilst this was probably the dominant view at the conference, there was also a vocal minority who felt that this perspective was arrogant and counter-productive. I suspect that this view springs in part from an implicit acceptance of the natural science framings of the Anthropocene - i.e. "humans have irrevocably changed the environment, and now we need to do something about it". So following this argument, several people thought it was damaging to be excluding natural scientists and engineers from our discussions as they are the people who have the skills and expertise to deal with the problem under this framing (see Melissa Leach's discussion of the scientific framings <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/Melissa-Leach/democracy-in-the-anthropocene_b_2966341.html">here</a>).<br />
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The conference presentations and discussions demonstrated well that in the social sciences and humanities at least there is still concern and anxiety about the relevance and usefulness of the term 'Anthropocene'. On the one hand, many acknowledged that it would have been difficult to get such a range of coverage of different topics and conceptual commitments at a conference organised around any other singular theme. And there were certainly points during the conference when we really felt that these different perspectives were starting to come into conversation with each other and clash in interesting ways. On the other hand, there was a sense with many of the presentations that they could easily have been given in the absence of any mention of the Anthropocene at all, without loosing any of their argument or content - indeed one or two of the presenters were quite open about this. So an important question to ask about future studies around the Anthropocene is: how can we avoid it becoming an umbrella-like term which only loosely encompasses existing work and approaches from climate politics to the political economy of genetic medicine? Or to put it more positively: (how) can humanists and social scientists develop novel and contexually appropriate conceptual resources for the study of the diverse contours of the Anthropocene? What, if anything, can the concept add to our existing analyses? And how can it be used to enrich our collaborations with scientists, artists, policy makers and others?</div>
Helenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02470059043966147522noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3867901930347817118.post-56058098108812687622013-07-09T04:02:00.001-07:002013-07-20T10:34:48.675-07:002°C and the geographies of truth and power in Copenhagen, 2009<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I have a <a href="http://3s.uea.ac.uk/blog/2%C2%B0c-and-geographies-truth-and-power-copenhagen-2009">post </a>over at the <i>Merton Stone</i> blog of the 3S Research Group introducing a new paper of mine in <i>Geoforum</i>, which is titled <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718513001218">Boundary spaces: science, politics and the epistemic geographies of climate change in Copenhagen, 2009</a>.</div>
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The paper explores some of the science-policy debates which played-out in the run up to the ill-fated international climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009. I engage with literatures on boundary-organisations, -objects and -work, as well as literature on organisational space to develop the notion of 'boundary spaces'. I basically try to argue that theories of formal boundary organisations are insufficient to capture the complex geographies by which scientific knowledge is negotiated and related to political decisionmaking. By these "complex geographies", I mean the diverse physical and discursive settings where knowledge is constructed and contested, often under certain guiding assumptions about how 'knowledge' and 'action' are related.</div>
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As I explain in the blog post, much of the debate in Copenhagen ended up revolving around the 2-degrees C temperature rise target. For some other recent commentary on the target, see Oliver Geden's piece in the <i>Guardian </i><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2013/jun/11/science-policy1">here</a>, and Mike Hulme's contribution to a discussion of the target in <em style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, 'Lucida Grande', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.mikehulme.org/2012/10/on-the-two-degrees-policy-target/">Climate change, justice and sustainability: linking climate and development policy</a>.</em></div>
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In addition to finalising my PhD thesis, I'm also currently working on a book chapter which will explore the politics of emissions accounting at the science-policy interface in India. The more I have explored this topic, the more it has become another interesting episode in the complex social life of the 2-degrees target.</div>
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My <i>Merton Stone </i>post can be found here: <a href="http://3s.uea.ac.uk/blog/2%C2%B0c-and-geographies-truth-and-power-copenhagen-2009">http://3s.uea.ac.uk/blog/2%C2%B0c-and-geographies-truth-and-power-copenhagen-2009</a></div>
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Martin Mahonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06289860645985022996noreply@blogger.com0