CFP - Communicating Science - Oxford 7-9 January 20123
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