Saturday 22 September 2012

Landscapes of change

‘Gathering Weather’ by Alfred Horsley Hinton.

Following on from the post below - 'Reading Waterland' - I've written a piece over at the Merton Stone blog on some recent work by cultural geographers on the relationships between landscape and climate change (link here). This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, and I've been plotting some ways of researching it in some local places, particularly the Norfolk Broads.

To that end, I was excited recently to come across the work of David Matless - a geographer at Nottingham University - particularly given that he has a forthcoming book on the cultural geography of the Norfolk Broads (see here). It looks like his work will be pretty central to any research plans I end up formulating!
Helen and I are currently over in Boston, MA as Visiting Fellows on Sheila Jasanoff's Science, Technology and Society program. I'm sure there'll be more blogging about that soon. At first I sensed some dissonance in thinking about landscape while sitting in an STS office in the Kennedy School of Government, but I was inspired by a presentation Sheila gave in which she implored STSers to continue the shift from simply 'following the actors' (i.e. scientists) in our studies, and instead follow anyone who's paths lead either towards or through science.  This suggests to me that there's plenty of scope for more interaction between STS and geography on questions of how climate change is presenced in the landscapes around us.

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