Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, September 19, 2016, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Pierce Hall, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

"The Competing Imaginaries of Solar Geoengineering"

Speaker:

Jeremy Baskin, Visiting Research Fellow, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard University; PhD Candidate, Political Science, University of Melbourne.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

Contact:

Shana Rabinowich Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.

Abstract:

Solar geoengineering is a controversial prospective technology which aims to moderate global warming by injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight. How best to understand solar geoengineering? What is constraining its becoming respectable? And what is at stake in the re-emergence of this prospective climate policy that was once regarded as taboo? I examine the competing imaginaries of solar geoengineering and the contested systems of knowledge, values and power that accompany its embrace (or rejection) as a climate strategy. I try to understand the ways in which the technology is entangled with visions of what a future world should be, assumptions of what humans are entitled to do, and beliefs about the end/s of nature.

Bio:

Jeremy Baskin is a Visiting Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is completing his PhD in Political Science at the University of Melbourne on the topic ‘Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the end of nature’. He also teaches a number of courses there, including ‘Global Environmental Politics’. His next project will explore the contested politics of energy and development in contemporary South Africa.