CfP Workshop: Experiencing the Global Environment

Experiencing the Global Environment

Workshop, February 4-6, 2016

Department II, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

The global environment is an idea that permeates the loosely connected cluster of disciplines referred to as the environmental or earth sciences. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, geology, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, ecology, and seismography, among others, have shared a common commitment to obtaining images and representations of the earth at the supra-anthropic scale. It is the scale of global circulation models, systems ecology, the biosphere, Spaceship Earth, and “big data.” This workshop seeks to write the human scale back into the history of the global environment by looking at individual and collective ways of experiencing nature in the work of practitioners in the environmental sciences.

There are at least two fundamental ways in which experiences of nature coevolved with the global environment. First, practices of data gathering confronted practitioners with perceptions of their local environment mediated by new technologies. This opened the way to new phenomena, from previously unheard sounds to newly discovered entities, such as radioactive minerals. Second, notions of an interconnected, global environment provided new conceptual frameworks with which to interpret and give order to particular experiences, from climatic variations to earth’s tremors.

In this workshop, we would like to turn our attention to the ways in which individual and collective experiences of nature have been transformed within the environmental sciences. The “body of the artisan“ has at times been assumed to fade before the immensity of planetary sciences. Acknowledging the presence of experience in the production of sciences of the global promises new ways of exploring this blossoming field. While the question of how local practices gave way to global knowledge has been central to the history of science and related fields in recent decades, we endeavor to focus on the coexistence and coproduction of local perception and sensory experience with global universal models and frameworks.

We hope to address a variety of questions in the workshop: how did new technologies and ways of perceiving cooperate in making new experiences of the environment possible? How did the construction of a global, interconnected environment change the perception and evaluation of locally gathered data? What kind of evidence did scientists use to construct images of a global environment and what kind of information did they potentially disregard in the process? How did professional and amateur practitioners describe and contextualize their own experiences of conducting research in an era of quantified data? How do technologies shape experience in ways that go beyond individual subjectivity? And what role did individual sensory experience play in the construction of large-scale models in the earth and environmental sciences?

Please send your proposals of up to 350 words to the organizers of the workshop by June 1, 2015.

Lino Camprubí (lcamprubi@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)

Philipp Lehmann (plehmann@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)