This public lecture is part of the CEH Summer University course "The Humanities and the Global Environmental Crises" and will be held online via Zoom. All are welcome to attend - please send an e-mail to ceh@cas.au.dk by 28 July and you will receive an invitation to the virtual meeting.

"This lecture addresses the techniques and practices of measurement, quantification and transformation of non-human environments that were devised by nation states and techno-scientific expert communities in twentieth-century rural South America. Based on empirical research, I focus on the clash between agents and institutions of the state and different Brazilian populations. I examine these confrontations and encounters in rural South America through the works of authors such as James Scott and Timothy Mitchell – along with Brazilian intellectuals."

Claiton Marcio da Silva is Associate Professor at the History Department at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (Chapecó, Brazil), Research Fellow at the Brazil’s National Research Council (CNPq) and Alumni Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximiliams University of Munich (2021). Professor Claiton has been teaching and conducting research on the History of Science and Technology as well as Environmental History. He is currently coordinating a network of researchers based in Europe, North America and South America aiming to explore the links between the expansion of soybeans and the Anthropocene – or, in his own words, the Soyacene. He is author of De agricultor a farmer: Nelson Rockefeller e a modernização da agricultura no Brasil (From rural worker to farmer: Nelson Rockefeller and the modernization of agriculture in Brazil; English version forthcoming in 2021).