Argument, Authority, Anxiety - special section of History of Meteorology

(c) Evgenia Arbugaeva

The latest volume of the journal History of Meteorology 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 International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Manchester in 2013.

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).

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.

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.

New article in Environment & Planning A: 'A decade of learning about publics, participation & climate change'

A 'wordle' representing the content of the paper

New commentary published on GM & public controversy

Picture from www.guardian.co.uk

Our commentary on the re-emergence of the public debate on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has recently been published here in the geography journal Area. The full title of the commentary is 'Boundaries, territory and public controversy: the GM debate re-materialised', and it's a very short article which can be downloaded by anyone with an institutional subscription to Area. It follows on broadly from the argument that Helen made in this post last May, on the protests related to GM wheat trials at Rothamsted Research. Instead of focusing on organisational learning, as the blog post did, we decided to focus on the materiality and spatiality of the GM debate and examine the multiple ways in which boundaries are being continually drawn and re-drawn.

Presenting the decade of learning

Presenting at SDN June 26th 2012

Over the last two months I have been preparing and giving conference presentations based on my Masters research. Though the experience of giving my first two conference papers was more than a little daunting, it was also a largely enjoyable one which definitely helped me to refine my ideas, meet interesting people and think of new ways to take my research forward. This blog post will include links to the presentations I gave, a few reflections on the process and what I might do differently in future, and how the conferences have shaped my future research plans.

(Re)publics of Science: a new 3S working paper

My working paper (Re)publics of Science: Changing Policy and Participation has been published on the 3S (Science, Society & Sustainability research group) website. This paper emerged out of my reading during the first year of my PhD; in particular, I was trying to make sense of where my own work on public participation in science policy sits in the contexts of decades of academic work and real world developments concerning science policy and its publics. The paper represents an attempt to give an account of developments in the field of public participation (mostly in Western Europe) over the last 50 years, considering the diverse visions of science, scientific expertise and 'the public' which they have brought about and been sustained by. 3S working papers are open access to all and free to download so have a look.