Knowledge Production about Planet Earth and the Global Environment as Indicators of Social Change

Knowledge Production about Planet Earth and the Global Environment as Indicators of Social Change

Veranstalter
Christian Rohr; Andrea Westermann
Veranstaltungsort
Oeschger-Zentrum für Klimaforschung
Ort
Bern
Land
Switzerland
Vom - Bis
23.01.2013 - 25.01.2013
Von
Andrea Westermann

The Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research of the University of Bern, the Institute of History of the University of Bern and the History Department of the University of Zurich are organising a conference to bring together historians of the earth sciences and environmental historians. It aims to explore the social, cultural and political changes induced by earth scientists and the knowledge and institutions they have created over the last two centuries.

Scope of the Conference

The conference will look at the issue of social change through the lens of earth matters. What do we learn about societies, their norms and collective mentalities by analysing how people dealt with planet earth, its history, climate, surface patterns, or the mechanisms underlying its dynamic structure? Topics of the precirculated papers include, for instance, the debate on desertification in the 19th century, the idea of deep time for social thinking about the future or the history of Arctic research. Each paper presentation will be followed by 20 minutes of comment and discussion. Invited speakers are Erhard Oeser (Vienna, A) and Naomi Oreskes (San Diego, USA). The public evening lecture is given by Joachim Radkau (Bielefeld, D).

Programm

January 23rd, 2013
14:00 Opening (OCCR member, TBA)
Christian Rohr (Bern, CH) and Andrea Westermann (Zurich, CH): Introduction

Session 1 Coping with Tectonic and Climatic Hazards
Chair: Stefan Brönnimann (Bern, CH)

14:20 Erhard Oeser (Vienna, A): The Development of the Wave Theory and its Application to Earthquakes. The Paradigm Shift at the end of the 19th century

14:55 Kerry Smith (Providence, USA) : Making Disasters Natural: Seismology and Prediction Regimes in Modern Japan

15:30 Conevery Bolton Valencius (Boston, USA) : Fracking and Seismic History in the Contemporary United States

16:05 Coffee break

16:20 Brian Rumsey (Lawrence, USA) : The Application of Methods of Probability to the Prediction of Floods in the USA (late 19th c. to the 1970s)

16:55 Anna Carlsson-Hyslop (Lancaster, UK) : Knowledge Production about Coastal Flooding in Britain, 1919–1959: How and why

17:30 End of Session 1

19:00 Public keynote lecture and Apéro
Joachim Radkau (Bielefeld, D): Historiker und Hockeyschläger – Geschichte als Geheimwaffe im Klimadiskurs (45 min)

Apéro

January 24th, 2013

Session 2 Global Resources and Knowledge Production
Chair: Gunter Stephan (Bern, CH)

09:00 Andrea Westermann (Zurich, CH) : Supplying the 20th century: How a steady flow of industrial raw materials was developed and how geologists helped create it

09:35 Perrin Selcer (Austin, USA) : Fabricating Unity: The FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World

10:10 Christian Kehrt (Hamburg, D) : Gondwana's Promises. German Geologists in Antarctica between Basic Science and Resource Exploration in the Late 1970s

10:45 Coffee break

Session 3 Arctic Research: Scientific, Economic and Social impact
Chair: TBA

11:00 Alexandra M. Avdonina (Vladimir, RUS) : Social Transformation in the Russian Far North in Connection with Discoveries in Geosciences

11:35 Ronald E. Doel (Tallahassee, USA) : What Really Mattered in the Arctic? Military Patronage and the Pursuit of Environmental Knowledge during the Early Cold War

12:10 Matthias Heymann (Aarhus, DK) : Investigating Arctic Environments: The Role of Greenland in the Early Cold War

12:45 Lunch

Session 4 Earth and Climate Governance

Chair: TBA

14:15 Naomi Oreskes (San Diego, USA): How the Earth Sciences Became a Social Science (and Why It Matters)

14:50 Ola Uhrqvist (Linköping, S) : Mentalities enabling Earth System modelling in GAIM and AIMES

15:25 Elena Aronova (Berlin, Germany; Fribourg, CH) : Knowledge of the Globe and Global Politics: The "Global Network for Environmental Monitoring" Project in the 1960s–1970s

16:00 Coffee break

16:15 Matthias Dörries (Strasbourg, F) : Politics, deep time, and the future

16:50 Christoph Rosol (Berlin, D) : Extremely Noisy and Incredibly Close. Reconstructing Deep-time Climate Change as a Means to Define the Present

17:25 Geoffrey I. Nwaka (Uturu, NG) : Indigenous Knowledge as Local Response to Globalization and Climate Change in Nigeria

18:00 End of Session 4

19:30 h Conference Dinner

January 25th, 2013

Session 5 Empires, European Experts and the Sciences of the Earth
Chair: Iris Schröder (Braunschweig, D)

09:00 Ryan Tucker Jones (Pocatello, USA) : Empire and Revolution in Peter Simon Pallas's Betrachtungen über die Beschaffenheit der Gebürge

09:35 Lorena B. Valderrama (Valencia, E) : European Experts, Earthquake Knowledge Transfer and the Institutionalization of Seismology. The Case of Chile

10:10 Coffee break

10:25 Bernhard C. Schär (Bern, CH) : Earth Scientists as Time Travellers and Agents of Social Change in the Colonial Era: An Example from Basel

11:00 Philipp N. Lehmann (Cambridge, USA) : The Threat of the Desert: Debates on Climate Change in the Late Nineteenth Century

Conclusions

11:35 Christian Rohr (Bern, CH): Synthesis

12:05 Final discussion

13:00 Snack buffet

14:30 City of Bern guided tour

Kontakt

Andrea Westermann

Historisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Karl Schmid-Strasse 4, 8006 Zürich

0041 44 6343813

andrea.westermann@hist.uzh.ch

http://www.oeschger.unibe.ch/events/conferences/climatenbeyond/programme_en.html
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