For this CEH TALK, we are excited to host Spencer Adams. Spencer is a visiting researcher from LMU-Munich’s Rachel Carson Center, and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Lecturer and Researcher in the Environmental Humanities. As a researcher, he is broadly interested in how science, labor, and infrastructure come together in the formation of planetary knowledges and in how working life is experienced in the context of environmental extremity and volatility.

You can learn more about Spencer and his research here.

The event is free and open to everyone to attend. Coffee and tea will be provided.

Abstract

Seen from the vantage point of Antarctic research stations, the project of global climate science is, as much as anything, an infrastructural endeavor. Climate observation stations, like those at the far reaches of the Earth, are less spaces of knowledge production akin to traditional laboratories, think tanks, research centers, or even field sites. Instead, they are infrastructures of data extraction, spatially and institutionally developed and maintained to ensure stable, consistent supplies of fresh environmental data, independent of shifting external conditions or the social particularities of the yearly replenished, on-ice workforce. How though do logics of infrastructure, usually thought in terms of long-term durability, interact with the ongoing, necessary transience that characterizes the Antarctic as a workplace? In responding to this question, this talk considers the case of the British Antarctic Survey’s exceptionally remote Halley station. Known in particular as the site of the famed ‘discovery’ of the ‘Ozone hole,’ I will trace in this talk distinct temporalities of working life at Halley station and the ways these temporalities have interacted and at times come into conflict with the imperative towards data continuity that underwrites Ozone data collection. Seeing the way nominally continuous data collection is stitched across day-to-day working routines, year-to-year staff turnover, decade-by-decade reconstructions of Halley’s built environment, and broad social-historical transitions in the composition of Halley’s workforce and in the technological mediation of working processes of atmospheric observation, this talk will situate ‘work’ in its various dimensions and social relations as a key and contingent dimension of global climate science’s ‘knowledge infrastructures.’