Research

Helen Pallett
For updates on Helen's research see her new website.


Martin Mahony

I am interested in how societies in different times and places make sense of weather and climate, and how atmospheric knowledges intersect with politics and power. My background is in human geography and science & technology studies (STS). I've conducted work on the contemporary visual cultures of climate change and on the role of simulation modelling and scientific assessment at the science-policy interface. I'm currently interested in the colonial history of meteorology in different corners of the British Empire in the early 20th century, and in the later institutionalisation of climate modelling in the UK in the 1980s. In all these time periods, I'm interested in how the atmosphere has been rendered as something potentially governable, albeit through scientific practices which are always uncertain, often tentative, and sometimes controversial. At the moment I'm thinking about how to connect debates in STS about the co-production of science and society with work in cultural and historical geography on the 'geographies of science', which is concerned with the role of space in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge.