2nd CFP - Communicating Science - Oxford 7-9 January 2013
Scientific Communication and its History – III
Climate
and Weather: Science as Public Culture
Conference at the Maison Française d’Oxford
7 – 9 January 2013
Call for Papers
This
is the third conference in a series devoted to historical and contemporary
perspectives on the communication of science and technology.
Climate and weather provide a
particularly rich and challenging case study to complete the conference series.
The climate sciences are characterised by complexity: in their professional
networks; their conceptual models; and the logistics of their large-scale data
and computing needs. Yet few modern scientific disciplines attract the same
level of public engagement, in both everyday life and passionate debate on the
future of the planet. Moreover, their status at the intersection of policy,
scientific controversy and the public sphere is not a recent development: the
same issues and fault lines ran through meteorology from the 18th-century
onwards.
Shifting
interests within the history of science and the development of environmental
history have greatly expanded the field in recent years. The conference will
provide an opportunity to reflect on these historiographical developments via a
specific focus on the communication of weather and climate from the 18th to the
21st centuries. Papers are invited to address three themes in particular:
Commodification
of meteorological knowledge - The recent period has been rich in new connections
between meteorology and the market: weather derivatives and weather insurances
to manage the ‘cost’ of weather, as well as wind mapping for the installation
of wind farms and wind modelling for energy trading, among other things. Can we
trace a long history of the nexus between meteorology and the economy broadly
conceived? For instance: the study of price cycles, the anticipation of
harvests, agricultural insurance for storms and gales, weather forecast for
maritime companies, the selling of meteorological instruments, calendars and
almanacs, the climate as a commodity in the context of the rise of tourism
practices.
Media – The diversity
and transformation of means to represent and present weather, from the central
aggregation of dispersed data in numerical tables to innovative cartographical
strategies, and from new broadcast media such as radio and television to the
use of museums as venues for public communication, are key features. Special
attention could be paid here to the public controversies raised by the gap
between demands for reliable prediction (weather forecasts, climate
simulations) and uncertainties in data and models.
Historicizing
climate history – In
relation to climate change, the history of climate and weather events is
receiving increasing attention. However, the practices of collecting and
assessing data concerning extreme seasons, meteorological disasters and
atmospheric parameters (temperature, rainfall etc.) has a long history. These
practices were widespread in the 18th century within the scholarly tradition of
“chronology” and in the community of natural philosophy, and from the early
19th century onwards among historians, orientalists, natural historians and
practitioners of the new discipline of ‘climatology’. The conference will
explore this long-term history of weather and climate reconstruction and
history. Special attention will be paid to the construction of thermometric
memory: in addition to the new media of registration, how was an instrumental
regime created to assure the continuity of thermometric measures? What kind of
architectural settings, gestural knowledge and instrumental protection allowed
the comparability of measurement across time? How has public engagement with
climate history developed and been negotiated?
Offers
of papers should include a title and an abstract of up to 300 words, and be
sent to Thomas Le Roux (thomas.leroux@history.ox.ac.uk) by 15
September 2012. The programme will be announced at the beginning of October
2012.
Funding
for travel and accommodation will be available, in particular for doctoral
students. The conference will last from Monday 7th, evening – with
a reception at the Museum of the History of Science including a private view of
the exhibition “Atmospheres: Investigating the Weather from Aristotle to
Ozone”– to Wednesday 9th, beginning of the afternoon.
Organised by the Maison Française
d’Oxford, in collaboration with the Museum of the History of Science, and with
the support of the French Embassy, London.
Organising Committee
Pietro Corsi, Oxford University
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Imperial
College, London
Robert Fox, Oxford University
Stephen Johnston, Museum of the
History of Science, Oxford
Muriel Le Roux, ENS/IHMC, Paris –
Maison Française d’Oxford
Thomas Le Roux, Maison Française
d’Oxford
Fabien Locher, CRH (CNRS/EHESS),
Paris
John Perkins, Oxford Brookes
University
Viviane Quirke, Oxford Brookes
University