Together my PhD project, I’m involved the following smaller projects:
Having met at conferences and during our studies, a group of PhD students in several European countries working at the intersection of the history of science and environmental history, we started in late 2022 an informal reading group to discuss the historiographic points of tension and dialogues between these two approaches to history. What is the place of ‘science’ in environmental history? What is the place of the ‘environment’ in the history of science? We meet online, twice a month. If you are interested you can sign up to the mailing list: https://sympa-2.sipr.ucl.ac.be/sympa/info/envhistofscience.
Together with Charles H. Pence, we run a yearly seminar at the Center for the Philosophy of Science and Society (CEFISES) at the Université catholique de Louvain. You can watch back the recorded sessions at the CEFISES website: https://cefises.be/en/weekly-seminars/. A brief description of the seminar’s goals:
Biodiversity raises a host of philosophical questions, including metaphysical (what kind of property is biodiversity, and is it the same property across all populations?), epistemic (how do we measure biodiversity in different contexts?), normative (what’s the relationship between biodiversity and social values?), and social/political (how is biodiversity taken up by political actors and international organizations?). The concept also has an interesting history, and one which can be explored by talking directly to researchers who were there at its inception (as the notion was only coined in the late 1980s) and by exploring histories of science and of the environment, where scientific aims and methodologies are deeply entangled with colonial histories, economic interests, and deep-seated notions about nature and the place of humans in it. We’re hoping to invite speakers who can explore as wide a variety as possible of these dimensions.
Together with Charles H. Pence, we will be hosting a conference in Brussels in October 2023 to bring together scholars from several traditions – at the very least, from philosophy of science, history of science, and environmental history – to propose different ways to think about ‘biodiversity’ and explore how they might interact. The CfP is closed and the programme will be up soon: https://pencelab.be/events/biodiversity-2023/.