We are delighted to announce the first of four events organised to celebrate the 40th anniversary year of the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University. As we outlined previously, the series will feature three online seminars, followed by a culminating hybrid event at the end of the year. We will use ‘temporalities’ as a broad guiding construct and take CSS’s anniversary as an opportunity to explore pasts, presents and futures in/of STS and the local, national and global shifts that shape our field and our work.
The series will feature contributions from a range of colleagues with connections to the CSS, both past and present. This first event features two CSS alumni. We are delighted to welcome back both Professor Adrian Mackenzie and Dr Louise Elstow. Adrian has been based at the Australian National University (ANU) since 2018, but was based previously for many years at Lancaster, including as a Professor of Technological Cultures in the Department of Sociology. Louise is an interdisciplinary social scientist and Assistant Teaching Professor in the Centre for Sustainable Development, Cambridge University, and gained her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University in 2023.
This first online seminar aligns closely to our data cultures and quantification research theme, with clear connections to our interest both in the politics and practices of knowledge production and in climate, energy, and environment.
In the seminar, each speaker will deliver a presentation, which will be followed by a conversation between the two speakers. There will then be an opportunity for wider collective discussion.
Event details
- Date: June 24th
- Time: 11.00-12.30 BST
- Location: Teams
- Registration: via Eventbrite. Registration is possible at any time, including once the event has started.
Presentation details
Accounting for trees in Abergavenny: temporalities, cycles and data practices in upland woodland creation
Louise Elstow (Centre for Sustainable Development, Cambridge University)
This presentation will reflect on temporalities in the context of cultures of datafication and quantification, using examples from sustainable development, woodland creation and landscape scale integrated land management on upland commons in Wales. Louise will show how the measurement of and accounting for trees and their ecological impact becomes entangled with the temporalities of trees. When is a tree a tree? When do trees count and what counts as a tree? Who can claim ownership of the act of tree planting? How do the temporalities and cycles of trees interact with the temporalities and cycles of funding, politics, farming, as well as rhodedendron, muntjac deer and Belted Galloways? How can the pests of today indicate trees (and pests) of the past and future?
Counting lives in patches: place and number in the Atlas of Living Australia
Adrian Mackenzie (School of Sociology, ANU) & Mitchell Whitelaw (School of Art & Design, ANU)
The paper reports on a collaborative project within a national biodiversity science platform, the ALA, and concerns a specific form of data: species counts. Species counts populate various scales or scientific infrastructures ranging from global knowledge infrastructures (Global Biodiversity Infrastructure Facility), popular citizen science platforms (iNaturalist, eBird), and many national and regional data repositories organised around species counts. Counting species within some frame (ecosystem, habitat, bioregion, sanctuary, landscape, historical baseline etc.) and then calculating something (biodiversity index, biodiversity assets, conservation or extinction status, ecosystem health, population distributions, hotspot, etc) provides a lens on change. The project worked with interested social groups and calculative devices to re-frame species count data around people’s experiences of the ensemble of lives and their histories in given places. To this end, in the collaboration, ecologists, interface designers and sociologist experimented with counting differently. Drawing on STS accounts of number and calculation (Verran, Callon), we suggest some ways to ground counts in patches. The broader implication here is that quite small practical changes in arithmetic can lead to different ways of approaching nature recovery, nature positive, re-wilding, re-wilding, nature-repair markets and conservation programmes.
Acknowledgements
Header image by Ivan Vranić, used and adapted under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.
