Open Studio: Roleplaying Chernobyl and Anthropocene Artefacts
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
2:30 PM-5:00 PM
You are invited to the stage of the Anthropo-Scene. Together, we will turn the era of the Anthropocene into a collaborative play with artefacts. The artefacts are efforts to understand this time period as particular places and times, specific peoples and practices involved.
Johan Gärdebo (1986) is PhD candidate at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Division for History of Science, Technology & Environment and affiliated to the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL).
Gärdebo studies the development of satellite remote sensing in Europe 1970-2000. Remote sensing has been important for perceptions of Earth as a global whole and conceptions of ecology, commons and resource exploitation. Earth's environment was made accessible and accountable using an infrastructure of technology, expertise and the utilization of outer space developed under the label of civil, commercial and dual-use of remote sensing.
Gärdebo participates in and co-authors the article 'The Orbital Technosphere', which is part of the upcoming Technosphere Special-issue (Anthropocene Review, in prep, 2016). The orbital technosphere is an exploration of Earth's extraterrestrial space that contains at one and the same time layers of data, debris and geopolitics that promote continued technological intensification of an environment external to Earth but which is connected to and indicative of similar processes on the planet's surface. The article aims to locate specific actors and responsibility for technospheric space and Anthropocenic time.
Gärdebo has also co-authored the special-issue 'Social Media in the Anthropocene' (Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, in prep, 2016), which grew out of of the joint efforts by participants at the first Anthropocene Campus at HKW, 2014. 'Social Media in the 'Anthropocene' looks at Anthropocene Studies as a concept that allows different disciplines to partake in a joint discussion and also as social media presents academia with a new medium for scholarly work. Social media and the Anthropocene both transcend previous boundaries of writing and thinking where the phenomena we observe is coterminous with us as observers. We are in the Anthropocene because we are the Anthropocene. What is written, shared, commented and revised is also increasingly intermixed through social media and open review of writing. If nothing else, the pace of change has made these conditions more salient and apparent to us.
Ellan Spero, PHD, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
I study the ways that people envision human progress, through the institutions, built environments, and narratives that they create. As a historian of technology, business, and higher education, my work is about drawing connections between the ways that people learn, produce, and maintain knowledge systems.
Through the lens of the “technological landscape,” my research focuses on the entanglement between built environments of industrial production, large-scale technological systems, and their embedded social geographies. I use this concept of landscape to bring attention to the shifting dynamic between humans and the “natural” world, and the role of scale from laboratories and buildings, to cities and regions. I am interested in the ways that people create and maintain collaboration across professional sectors and have been working on nascent academic-industrial partnerships in the early 20th century. I aim to not only contribute to my own academic fields, but also to facilitate the accessibility of perspectives from history and social studies of science and technology for those who are shaping our future societies.
I have recently co-founded a non-profit working on systemic change in higher education. I am currently a visiting scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg, Switzerland, a research and development center for the built environment of the future. As a joint post-doctoral fellow at MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) I created coursework that engaged students in analysis of technology, culture, and the city. I hold a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society, a BS and MS from Cornell University in Fiber Science and Apparel Design, and M.A from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Museum Studies and Textile Conservation.
Contact Information
Scott Knowles
sgk23@drexel.edu