[Athena] annonce de colloque

[Thomas Le Roux <oekoomeo AT gmail.com>]

Scientific Communication and its History – III

 

Climate and Weather: Science as Public Culture

 

Conference at the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO)

Reception at the Museum of the History of Science

 

7 – 9 January 2013

 

This conference is the third 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. As with other disciplines studied during the previous conferences, 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 18^th-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 18^th to the 21^st centuries. The conference will address three themes in particular: Commodification of meteorological knowledge, Media, and Historicizing climate history.

 

Monday 7^th January 2013

Museum of the History of Science

18.00. Reception at the Museum of the History of Science including a private view of the exhibition “Atmospheres: Investigating the Weather from Aristotle to Ozone”. Welcome by Stephen Johnston, Acting Director.

  

Tuesday 8^th January 2013

MFO

9.15 Welcome, by Cyril Van Effenterre (French Embassy), Anne Simonin (MFO), Muriel Le Roux (ENS-IHMC) and Thomas Le Roux (MFO)

9.30 General introduction, by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Imperial College, London) and Fabien Locher (CRH-EHESS/CNRS)

  

9.45 – 13.00. Session “Commodification of meterological knowledge”

Chair. John Perkins (Oxford Brookes University)

9.45. Julien Vincent (University Paris I), Disembedded Weather: Labour, Free Trade, and the Political Economy of Climate in the British Empire (Mid-Nineteenth Century)

10.15. Yngve Nilsen (University of Bergen), Shifting Relations Between Meteorology and Economic Interests in Norway 1860-1900

10.45 – 11.15 Coffee break

 

Chair. Robert Fox (University of Oxford)

11.15. Jamie L. Pietruska (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey), The U.S. Weather Bureau and the Policing of Counterfeit Weather Forecasts at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

11.45. Vladimir Jankovic (University of Manchester), Andrew Bowman (University of Manchester), 'Think of It As a Market Transition': Big Green Business and the Promise of Climate Crisis

12.15 – 13.00. General discussion on this session

 

14.15 – 16.30. Session “Media”

Chair.  Stephen Johnston (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford)

14.15. Alexander Hall (University of Manchester), Framing the Sky: The (re)Birth of Weather Forecasting on British Television, 1954

14.45. Julie Hudson (Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford), ‘If You Want to Be Green Hold your Breath’: Climate Change in British Theatre

14.45 – 15.15. Coffee break

15.15. Susanne Lorenz (University of Leeds), The Communication of Scientific Uncertainty and Climate Adaptation in the Media: Comparing the UK and Germany

15.45 – 16.30. General discussion on this session

17.00 Lecture

Chair. Pietro Corsi (University of Oxford)

Pascal Lecomte (European Space Agency, Harwell-Oxford), Data: From Satellites to the Public. The Value of Climate Data, their Cost and How they are Perceived by the Public

  

Wednesday 9^th January 2013

MFO

9.00 – 13.00. Session “Historicizing climate history”

Chair. Muriel Le Roux (ENS-IHMC, Paris)

9.00. Anouchka Vasak (University of Poitiers), 1802, « The Invention of Clouds », as Seen from Either Side of the Channel.

9.30. Thomas Labbé (University of Burgundy), Fabien Gaveau (CESDIP CNRS- French Ministry of Justice), Vinyard Harvest Dates and History of Climatology: Some New Epistemologic Reflections

10.00. George N. Vlahakis (Hellenic Open University), Climate, Weather and Society in 19^th century Greece

10.30 – 11.00 Coffee break

 

Chair. Serge Plattard (European Space Policy Institute, Vienna)

11.00. Philippe Forêt (University of St Gallen), Overland to India. The Debate on Climate Change of 1904-1914

11. 30. Matthias Heymann, Janet Martin Nielsen, Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen (Aarhus University), Negotiating Simulation Knowledge: Alternative Perspectives on Climate and Climate Change

12.00 – 12.45. General discussion on this session

12.45 – 13.00. General discussion

14.00 – 15.30 Round Table “Communicating Science and its History”

This Round Table will be devoted to the entire cycle of conferences on Communicating Science and its History, organised by the MFO and held in 2011 in Oxford, in 2012 in Paris and in 2013 in Oxford. Round Table coordinated by Muriel Le Roux

 

Organised by the Maison Française d’Oxford, in collaboration with the Museum of the History of Science, the Faculty History of the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, the Centre Koyré (EHESS) and the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (IHMC), 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

Jeanne Peiffer, Centre Koyré (CNRS/EHESS/MNHN), Paris

John Perkins, Oxford Brookes University

Viviane Quirke, Oxford Brookes University 

For further details, contact Thomas Le Roux, thomas.leroux AT history.ox.ac.uk. Please tell us if you will be attending.

Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3AZ

Maison Française d’Oxford, 2-10 Norham Road, Oxford, OX2 6SE, fifteen minutes north of the city centre.

 

Attachment: Conference Climate Weather 2013, programme.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document