Life in the Anthropocene: reflections on a couple of recent talks

Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In (2014) - David Gasi

By Martin

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.

The Tragedy of Climate Change - forthcoming public lecture by Joshua Howe at King's College London

(c) Rosa Merk

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 Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming, and will be talking to the title: 

The Tragedy of Climate Change:History, science, and the politics of global warming in the United States

Here's the abstract for the talk:

'Author of the recent book Behind the Curve, 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 CO₂ – 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.'

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: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-tragedy-of-climate-change-tickets-14189277511

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.

New paper on the 'burning embers'

By Martin

My analysis of the history of the IPCC's 'burning embers' diagram has now been published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. I've written a short post for the Geography Directions blog 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: see here. Below is the new paper's abstract:

New paper: 'The geographies of the conference'

Protesting the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

Ruth Craggs and I have a new paper out in Geography Compass which reviews existing work on the political and cultural geographies of conferences in politics and science.

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.

Red mist descending: the curious history of the IPCC's 'burning embers'

By Martin

A couple of years ago I wrote a short paper (here in PDF) 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".

Presenting my PhD research - conference schedule summer 2014

By Helen

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!

Exploring the future-conditional with Pinterest

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 'Postcards from the Future' 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.

Bruno Latour on war and peace in a time of ecological conflicts

By Martin

Update: audio and video now available here

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.

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.

New paper - 'Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface'

By Helen

I am very excited to announce that my first official publication from my PhD has appeared online, 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.