Gallatin CIS-Symposium

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Much of the work to date on Empire and environment has been focused on control. How imperial governments sought to collect, classify, and order the flora and fauna or sought to manage, engineer, and contain nature through hydraulic projects, land-use change, weather studies and even climate engineering. Many, or most, of these things related to profit, through maximising, extracting, or planting commercial resources but have also been said to reflect a wider, symbolic representation of power over nature, ergo, power over colonised lands through technical superiority and the imposing of colonial systems of knowledge. This workshop seeks to ask instead – what happened when things went wrong?

The history of failure can be as illuminating as the history of success (Geels and Smit, 2000). Why things went wrong and the impacts of these failures have been explored to some extent in recent environmental history and the history of science. Historians of environment and empire, for instance, have long pointed out the detrimental effects of colonial resources extraction and agriculture on colonised countries (Grove, 1997; Kathirithamby-Wells, 2005) or how the intervention of colonial rule exacerbated nature-induced hazards (Davis, 2002; Damodaran, 2015). Another strand has also explored the filtraBon of indigenous customs into the colonial project, fragmenting imperial visions of rule (Sivasundaram, 2013). Most recently however, this turn in colonial historiography has explored engineering schemes that never materialised (Lehmann, 2022) or the inability to adequately forecast or prepare for drought (Morgan, 2020; Williamson, 2022); or the prominence of imagination over ability (Mahony, 2020). This workshop asks to take this one step further by examining the dialectic of success and failure by exploring instances or evolutions of  failure and the ramifications that this has had, broadly conceived.

SELECTION CRITERIA

This conference will be jointly hosted by the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the College of Integrative Studies at Singapore Management University and welcomes proposals from all interested scholars. NYU Gallatin School full-time faculty participants will have travel and accommodations covered.

Paper subjects may include, but are not limited to:

• The environment in the arts and the imagination

• Environmental history

• Histories of technoscience, field and natural sciences

APPLICATION PROCESS

If you are interested in taking part, please send a one-page description of your intended paper for consideration to co-convenvers Fiona Williamson (fwilliamson@smu.edu.sg) and Todd Porterfield (todd.porterfield@nyu.edu), by which should be sent no later than 1 December 2023.

Completed proposals should include:

• Title

• Abstract of no more than 300 words

• Author biography and affiliation