Descartes Centre Colloquium with Kris Decker (University of Lucerne)

The pedagogy of climate science and the (potential) use of the humanities and arts in them

Abstract talk

From a science studies perspective, Kris Decker will outline some tentative ideas for a long-term study of academic training scenes. How do students in the climate sciences learn the tricks of their trade and grow into the thought style of their field? How can the ethnographer of science observe and contemplate that process through fieldwork in lectures and seminars, on fieldtrips and excursions? And what might be the pitfalls, both pragmatic and theoretical, of such an endeavor?

Kris Decker is a postdoc at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and currently a Descartes fellow working with Robert-Jan Wille. Kris studies climate issues and the climate sciences as they move between artistic, activist, and academic realms.
 

Abstract panel discussion

Using Kris’ talk and the 2023 Social Studies of Science paper which Kris published together with Christoph Hoffmann (attached) as a starting point, the discussants will talk about the pedagogy of climate science and the (potential) use of the humanities and arts in them.

Elizabeth Case is a postdoctoral researcher in glaciology at UU’s Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Physics. They study how ice forms, flows, and disappears, and what will happen to surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the next century. They received their PhD from Columbia University (NYC, USA). They are also a writer and co-founder of the art-science collaboration, Glacial Hauntologies, interested in the generative potential of doing and understanding disciplines through each other – what Karen Barad calls "intra-action".

Robert-Jan Wille is a VENI-postdoc at the Freudenthal Institute. Since December 2019 he has been working on the history of German atmospheric physics. For his VENI-project, he researches how Germany became a leading European power in the science of meteorology and upper atmosphere physics, dealing with the political regimes of Wilhelmine, Weimar and Nazi Germany. This project is part of a larger mission to bring more (open) air into the history of science and at the same time bring more history of science into the cultural study of air.