We want to invite you to an open mid-term evaluation with our PhD-fellow in the Lifetimes project Emil Henrik Flatø. To comment on the candidates work, we have invited Professor and Director of Values in Design Laboratory, University of California at Irvine, Geoffrey Bowker.
In this work-in-progress session, Flatø will try out the notion that we need to probe the “temporalities of anthropogenic consequences” in order to illuminate the stakes of scientific claims about future climates.
These consequences are material events, forming part of a history of human impacts on the planet. But they also have an intellectual history, becoming especially salient in the U.S. after the Second World War, as the public was faced with the annihilatory capacity of nuclear bombs, the earth-transcending possibilities of space travel, the booming impactfulness of the “Great Acceleration”, and spectacular environmental destructions.
Focusing on a community of privileged, mobile and well-connected electrical engineers and management experts at M.I.T. leading up to the turn of the 1970s, Flatø will try to account for how an accepted science of “our common future” came into being, on a quest for the critical epistemological junctures that affect what futures can and cannot be thought – just as the IPCC is claiming we are entering the final decade in which it might still be possible to stay below 1.5C of global warming.
Emil Henrik Flatø is employed as a Research Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages. His project is connected to the lager research project Lifetimes.