Panel chair: Matt Adams
Abstracts
What is the role of collaboration in the fictional depiction of Women in STEM?
JULIE EVERTON
What can gender bring to science and technology? This talk focuses on a my new piece of fiction, based on historical and scientific facts, about the meeting of three scientists in the summer of 1912: the ground breaking, working class electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton, a suffragette, physicist Marie Curie, who was escaping a scandal in France, and a radical free thinking journalist and writer Evelyn Sharp. Collaboration was key for each of these women’s achievements. It’s a story of first wave feminism, the challenges faced by women in STEM at that time, in a male dominated industry that undermined women’s rights to be part of the key institutions. It also wants to explore and the role of friendship between women scientists. My interest is in collaborating with scientists and science journalists in order to create authenticity to the narrative.
The Art and Science of (Resisting) Extractivism
ALICE OWEN
Despite declaring a Climate Emergency, Surrey County Council have granted a small company permission for twenty years of oil production at the Horse Hill site near Gatwick. Although a relatively small-scale project, the Horse Hill case nonetheless illustrates the pervasiveness of the conceptual tools of extractivism and the restrictions these set on the framing and tactics of the campaigns against it.
Resource extractivism can be understood as a state-led socio-economic regime (Gudynas, 2018 ) and more broadly as a mindset based on “removing as much material as possible for as much profit as possible” (Willow, 2018). Following feminist critiques of science, this extractive mindset stems from enlightenment ideas separating humans from the rest of nature and the assumptions that nature is knowable through scientific experimentation and controllable through technological intervention (e.g. Merchant, 1980; Haraway, 1988). Scientific conventions, such as the geological resource map, render natural complexity as a simplified, homogenised and available commodity thus eliciting an extractive way of seeing.
Such critiques argue Science cannot necessarily claim objectivity, meanwhile there is a continued dependence on scientific claim-making by environmental justice movements because of the privileged position Science has in society. As analysis of the campaign against Horse Hill illustrates, scientific claims have been relied upon to contest the oil production operations yet thus far this has not been enough to contend with the logics, institutions and policies which continue to legitimise and promote extractivism whilst implicitly denying climate change. Artistic and creative interventions offer alternative ways of seeing, but can these be effective tools to fight with?
Gudynas, E. (2018). 3 Extractivisms. Tendencies and consequences. Reframing Latin American Development. R. Munck and R.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature. London: Wildwood House.
Willow, A. J. (2018). Understanding extrACTIVISM: culture and power in natural resource disputes. Routledge.
Education in the Anthropocene
TOBY LOVAT AND DEBORAH MADDEN
The notion that perspectives in the arts and humanities are trivial and redundant in the face of contemporary practical and technical challenges, is at best misguided and at worse dangerous. Dialogue between both the hard sciences and the arts is crucial. Without it, the former is unmoored from critical reflection, and the latter is hopelessly ill equipped to properly understand or respond to contemporary global challenges. While the hard sciences obviously lie at the heart of understanding and solving many of the world’s most pressing challenges – whether climate change, global pollution, the collapse of biodiversity, food insecurity and the threat of new pandemics – science and its solutions neither do nor could make sense outside of the various social, moral, political, historical, and cultural contexts in which we live.
It is with this in mind that colleagues in the School of Humanities have embarked on work to develop inter and trans-disciplinary courses and degrees in Environmental, Health and Digital Humanities. Our aim is to draw on research and teaching expertise from across the university to offer innovative degrees that combine perspectives and tools in both the arts and humanities, and sciences. While the event provides an opportunity to foster new collaborations and find ways of working across schools, our joint presentation will discuss the scholarly and practical importance of combining disciplines and introduce our plans for new degrees in relation to the needs of students who will have to navigate change as informed and critical citizens of planet Earth.