Keynote speakers

In this lecture, Huub Dijstelbloem seeks to investigate parallels, contrasts, and possible transversal relationships between climate adaptation and migration policies. Policies on these issues are constantly navigating under the threat of introducing extreme infrastructures, which claim to solve the problems and make alternative paths impossible. Whereas climate adaptation policies increasingly emphasize the use of flexible instruments to make societies more resilient to climate change, fortification and weaponization have returned with a vengeance in migration policy. The lecture will elaborate on several traditions of STS-research to detect novel conceptual, empirical, and political questions to stimulate STS’ technopolitical imagination. Working with the notions of social sorting and boundary infrastructures, the lecture will analyze the tensions between the underlying technics and politics of different categorizations of climate mobility and non-mobility, such as environmental migration, climate migration, disaster displacement, managed retreat, refugees, and victims. Using research on visualization and surveillance, parallels between the scientific-technological apparatus to monitor climate change and the development of databases and information systems that monitor migration and displacement will be drawn. Specific attention will be paid to the question of which kinds of knowledge and expertise and which kind of experts are involved in the analysis of environmental and climate migration and how this affects the nature of these analyses and monitoring systems, including the analysis of the mobility of nonhuman animals (e.g. bird migration and other wildlife circulation) as they shift their habitat ranges to track their ecological niches. How does this affect research approaches and the organization of knowledge, for instance when fields such as biodiversity and migration studies are turned into ‘crisis disciplines’? Is redefining research areas useful to circumvent the introduction of extreme infrastructures in adapting to climate change and international migration in Europe?

What does it mean to conduct science in the public interest in times of a general emergency? Recent studies of expert advice during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK have noted the exceptional circumstances in which science gained broad and practical public relevance, as Covid-19 affected the whole UK population (Green et al, 2022). They have also argued that institutionalised relations between science and politics contributed to the crisis in the UK, as secrecy and reliance on a narrow range of expertise allowed underexamined assumptions to gain disproportionate influence on government policy, especially in the early phase of the pandemic (Pearce, 2020; Ballo et al, 2022). In view of this, it becomes especially important to examine how scientists devised alternative strategies to intervene in the pandemic by making science public. To this end, I am currently conducting a social study of Independent Sage, the group of scientists that formed in May 2020 to provide independent scientific advice to the UK government and public public on how to minimise deaths and support Britain’s recovery from the COVID-19 Crisis." Using methods of situational analysis (Clarke, Friese et al, 2017), I investigate how Independent Sage sought to "make a difference" in the public stituations (Barry, 2021; Marres, forthcoming) of the Covid-19 emergency by intervening in three topical areas: test and trace, covid-related inequalities, and science-informed governance in society (such as schools). In this talk, I will present a situational analysis of IndieSage's interventions in these areas based on expert interviews with members and societal partners of Independent Sage as well as document analysis. On this basis, I will formulate some practical, methodological and aspirational answers to the question with which this abstract begins.

What we call “technology” today involves intensely concentrated metabolic processes, ingesting and transforming energy and materials on a planetary scale. Techno-metabolism also concentrates and compresses time. Its temporalities include Earth's deep past (fossil fuels, minerals) and its present (biological net primary production). The Anthropocene epoch – with humanity as a geological force – now appears likely to consume, as well, the human future, potentially to the extinction of our species. Holding multiple temporal and spatial scales within our analytic frameworks has proven (unsurprisingly) difficult for STS and History of Technology. This talk offers ways of reconfiguring our conceptual and methodological tools to meet this urgent challenge.