LIAS Talk: "The Invention of Climate: Colonial Natures and Modern Societies"
Wednesday, Mai 29th, 6pm-20pm
29. May
Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, Cambridge University
Discussant: Christina Wessely, Professor for Cultural History, Leuphana University Lüneburg
During the urgency of the climate crisis it has become ever more important to understand the genealogy of the very notion of climate and its political and scientific senses. There have been several consequential changes in the scope of the terminology of climate, many linked quite directly to the interests of colonial and of economic domination. Transitions, in particular, from climate understood in the high enlightenment as a geographical and a cartographic concept to more recent imperial models of global temperature, linked very closely to the material methods used by practitioners observing and changing climates, with the closely associated notion of climate proxies, have had very significant consequences, both for aggressive policy and for common understanding.
Leuphana Campus, Lecture Hall 3