Together my PhD, I’m involved the following projects:
Together with Charles H. Pence, we are 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. Keynotes: David Sepkoski and Alkistis Elliot-Graves. The CfP is closed, the programme is out: https://pencelab.be/events/biodiversity-2023/.
‘Reading, listening, and reading’ is an interactive installation in the form of a collective walk around sound devices. Conference attendees will hear the voices of fellow colleagues in environmental history (and related fields) speaking of their intimate practices of reading and listening. Now, we ask participants to tell us how they read a source, read a colleague’s book, actively listen to a witness, or read changes and conflicts in the landscape. With the collection of voices, we will create a mixed-media dispositif: voices, texts, images, and diagrams will serve to create a warm and sensorial space. We are now seeking interested people to engage in conversation with us (either in person or online) for no more than 2 hours. We want to hear about your day-to-day reading habits and your reflections on what reading means to you. In your ‘paper proposal’, please simply write a few sentences describing why you want to participate in the workshop. With this proposal, we want to emphasize the hybridity of our sources, and how we listen to the non-human and each other. In the spirit of WCEH2024, we strive for inclusivity and aim to (very literally), include as many diverse voices as possible. The guiding thread is to explore how what we read in our environment is mediated by the variety of reading practices themselves. This installation is a proof of concept on how artistic practices can serve as methodologies in the ambition to re-think how we share our research beyond conventional academic formats.
Our workshop proposal has been accepted to the 4th World Congress of Environmental History, to take place in Oulu (Finland), 19-23 August 2024 https://wceh2024.com/.
This installation has been developed by Brussels-based duo: Alicia Jeannin (spoken-word audiovisual artist, performer and scenographer) and Max Bautista Perpinyà.
Organised together with fellow iHC doctoral students Carolina Granado and Hèctor Isern. Program to be distributed shortly.
Environmental history and the history of science have established themselves as self-standing disciplines for several decades now. However, despite the amount of topics they cover in common, the relationships between these two disciplines have not always been simple or obvious.
This seminar aims to create a space for researchers to outline possible forms of EH-HS relationships. Questions such as temporality, geographical scale, themes and methodologies emerge as points of tension and dialogue between the two disciplines. The link between historiographical propositions and the political agency of society and nature is also a central component that seems to differentiate the two disciplines but may unite them in new scholarship. Furthermore, given the time of eco-social crisis in which we live, we believe that it would be futile to practice a history that was blind to current eco-social problems, just as it would be beneficial for activism to take into account the historical trajectory of environmental struggles, or to reflect on the different ways that science is presented in envisioning solutions. For this reason, we also want to give a space to reflect on the existing interactions between these two disciplines and activism and imagine possible new scenarios.
CFP out soon.
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 year-long seminar in 2022-23 at the Center for the Philosophy of Science and Society (CEFISES) at the Université catholique de Louvain. You can watch 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.