Date:
Location:
"What's the Use of Climate Science? Towards a History of the Usable Turn"
Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)
Speaker:
Deborah Coen, Professor of History; Chair, Program in History of Science & Medicine, Yale University.
Contact:
Paul Sherman
paul_sherman@hks.harvard.edu
Co-sponsored by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Remote Access Information:
To join by computer:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ldeqqqTwtGdTebLtLn53hB3luI_KR1Gow
Please note: This event requires registration in advance in order to receive the meeting link and password.
Abstract:
Certain members of the scientific community have recently framed anthropogenic climate change as an invitation to reimagine the practice of science. These calls to reinvent science coalesce around the notion of “usable” knowledge, signaling the impulse to ensure that research will serve the needs of those impacted by climate change. But how novel is this concept? I will argue that usable science cannot be equated with nineteenth-century “useful knowledge” nor twentieth-century “applied” or “planned” science. It is indeed new, but it is not as new as scientists today would have us think. In fact, usable climate science is contemporaneous with the formulation of the “CO2 problem” as such in the late 1970s. Efforts to make climate science usable have generated robust exchange and intellectual convergence between natural and social scientists over the past forty years, but the benefits have not been equally distributed. This history holds lessons, both hopeful and cautionary, for Science Studies scholars concerned with the problems of the Anthropocene today.
Speaker Bio:
Deborah Coen is professor of History and Chair of the Program in History of Science & Medicine at Yale University, where she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Program. Her research focuses on the history of the modern physical and earth sciences and the intellectual and cultural history of central Europe. She is the author, most recently, of "Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale," and "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter."
