Talks by Özden-Schilling (14 Sept) and Hulme (22 September) at UNIGE
Lucas Mueller
We are delighted to welcome two distinguished speaks in the series of Geneva Environmental Lectures, which are organized as part of the SNSF Ambizione project "Avalanches", in September.
This talk introduces key themes from The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods, a new book by Tom Özden-Schilling that explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims. By focusing on researchers’ experiences and personal attachments, Özden-Schilling illustrates the complex relationships between researchers and rural histories of conservation, environmental conflict, resource extraction, and the long-term legacies of scientific research.
Tom Özden-Schilling is Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. His first book, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods (Duke, 2023), is a historical ethnography of twenty-first century environmental deregulation in British Columbia, Canada, and its effects on both Indigenous and settler researchers’ struggles to maintain long-term forestry experiments and sovereignty projects. His recent work has been published in American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, Environmental Humanities, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, History and Theory, and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and he is currently co-editing (with Dian Million, Candis Callison, and Denielle Elliott) a volume of essays titled Unsettling Indigenous and Settler Science, Technology, and Society. Tom’s current research examines new forms economic mobility and conflict emerging alongside “critical minerals” research and finance initiatives in Western Australia, Malaysia, and the American Mountain West.
Numbers shape the world around us in powerful ways. Global temperature is one such number which, over the past 30 years, has become central for guiding and evaluating international climate policy. From the Paris Agreement—with its aim to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2°C above the 19th century level—to the concept of Net Zero, global temperature shapes global politics and our visions for the future. It has become an ‘emperor indicator’. But what is global temperature? Was it discovered or invented, and when? How did scientists come to place such importance on this one number? Based on a forthcoming book, this talk introduces the history of this hugely consequential number which has hitherto remained untold. The story starts in the 1870s and culminates in the early 1980s when two independent efforts, on either side of the Atlantic, resulted in this index of global climate first gaining scientific credibility and, more importantly, political salience. Understanding this history helps us see more clearly the merits and demerits of using global temperature to guide policy. But might there have been, and might there still be, better ways of measuring the health of the world’s climate?
We look forward to seeing many of you in September.
Kind regards,
Lucas Müller
Lucas Mueller, PhD
Collaborateur Scientifique II
Université de Genève
Faculté des Sciences de la Société
CH-1211 Genève 4
+41 22 37 93337