Cultural spaces of climate change
AHRC funded network led by Georgina Endfield, Environmental History, University of Nottingham, UK
Workshops
The network will draw together representatives from disciplines within and outside the arts and humanities, with professional and learned societies and public interest groups, with whom the applicants have strong links, in three themed workshops. Each day-long event will involve c.15 participants and keynote speakers.
1.) “Re-culturing Climate”. Nottingham (Dec 3rd 2010) involving presentations by participants, a keynote speaker (Fleming), and group discussions on ways to incorporate arts and humanities perspectives into contemporary climate research, media representation of climate change issues and climate discourses.
Video of Jim Fleming's lecture
2.) “Historicising Climate”. Royal Geographical Society-with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), Kensington Gore (March 16th 2011) focusing on how historical perspectives can offer insight into the changing nature of the relationship between climate and people and different cultural attitudes to climate over time. The purpose is also to bring historical materials into wider public and professional circulation and illustrate their use in developing narratives of climates past and present. This workshop will involve group discussions, presentations, a keynote speaker (Golinski) and an opportunity to explore the manuscript collections, prints and photographs, film, artefacts, maps and other holdings at the RGS-IBG.
3.) “Popularising Climate”. The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), Reading (late June 2011) focusing on the involvement of amateur/ enthusiast communities to establish how they might become more involved as intermediaries between the public, academic and professional domains. This will dovetail with LWEC objectives aimed at improving the way in which communities in the UK with different cultural backgrounds and belief systems understand - and can live- with climate change. This workshop will include presentations by representatives from the Climatological Observers Link (COL), The Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS), the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS).
Context
Climate change has been catapulted into global centre stage, becoming one of the dominant environmental concerns of the 21st century. In the process, popular, local discourses of climate have been replaced by a global, scientific meta-narrative. Although climate change has been subject to considerable scrutiny by the physical sciences, recent scholarship has argued for a re-examination of the ‘idea’ of climate and its culturally and spatially variable dimensions. The purpose of the proposed network is to draw together representatives from the arts and humanities, the broader research community, learned and professional societies and popular interest groups, to identify ways to redress the global and scientific bias in climate discourses, to explore the meaning of climate for different groups of people in different spatial and temporal contexts and to interrogate climate’s ontological status. A particular goal is to bridge communication gaps between global, scientific climate change narratives and local, cultural narratives of climate, including those more sceptical of anthropogenic climate change. This will be achieved through interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral workshops with the following objectives:
1.) To question the bias toward climate change, and global as the preferred scale, in contemporary climate research
2.) To refocus attention on public understanding of climate, and weather, at the local, sensory level
3.) To consider the changing cultural spaces of climate knowledge production, past and present
4.) To explore the actual and potential role of interest groups, including enthusiast/amateur, professional and learned societies in the collection, production and circulation of climate knowledge past and present.
Political and media focus on climate change, the predominantly scientific discourse in which this is couched, and increasingly global-scale climate thinking, have obscured the culturally specific and spatially and temporally distinctive meanings of climate. The rhetoric of climate change has become inseparable from complicated and contradictory scientific evidence and to the general public, climate change remains a “rather abstract issue in a world full of pressing social and environmental concerns”. In line with the objectives of the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) programme, it is essential to gain a better understanding of how different groups of people have conceptualised climate and have responded to its fluctuations. Given that climate has come to mean “different things to different people in different contexts, places and networks,” research is also needed that considers the ‘idea’ of climate as a “hybrid phenomenon”, constructed, not only through the use of meteorological statistics but also through “sensory experiences, mental assimilation, social learning and cultural interpretations”, and which explores how ‘ordinary people’ understand, talk or write about climate and weather and make sense of it. Such work would investigate climate as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of ‘climate knowledge’, and demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives afford.
Contemporary climate change debates also obscure a long history of public engagement in meteorological endeavour and different ideological and symbolic constructions of climate at different points in history. Scholars have begun to focus on cultural histories of attitudes toward the weather, the myriad ways in which humans have understood climate in different places and at different points in time, and the genealogy of climate change debates. Such approaches are affording a spatially, temporally and culturally specific understanding of climate. But there are still only a handful of researchers “engaged in the social and cultural processes of speaking about climate change, of the formation and using of lay knowledge …and popular explanations of climate and its interaction with people”, and there is still much to be done at the “fluid boundaries between climate, space and culture”
The relational context of climate, “the places people live, their histories, daily lives, cultures or values”, has been identified as critical for understanding how different groups of people in different cultural contexts comprehend climate. Place has been pivotal to the production, reception and circulation of climate knowledge in the past, but also informs how contemporary climate debates are framed, with surveys suggesting that “everyday experiences and locality”, or the situated nature of climate, is fundamental to understanding public conceptualisations of climate change.
A focus on scientific explanations of climate change has also served to overlook the contributions of other interest groups. Enthusiasts and amateur societies, for example, have played a pivotal role in the production of climate knowledge in the past. The professionalisation of meteorological science in the late 19th century did not wholly supersede this amateur tradition, yet there has been a neglect of the amateur in contemporary climate discourses. Calls for a ‘post-normal science’ of climate, however, involving diverse groups in the production of climate knowledge, have highlighted how ordinary citizens may complement research conducted by professional climate scientists.