SSPS Research Seminar (Environment Theme): Environing Technologies

Hosted by the School of Social and Political Sciences Research Seminar, together with the Sydney Environment Institute, Vere Gordon Child Centre, and School of Humanities.

1pm–3:30pm, Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom, Madsen Building (F09) Room 495 and Zoom (Please note: the Zoom link will be sent at 9am on the day of the event and 15 minutes prior to the event commencing.)

Please join us for lunch at 1pm, followed by a research seminar delivered by Sverker Sörlin (KTH Stockholm) and chaired by David Schlosberg (Government and International Relations, SSPS and Director, Sydney Environment Institute).

Human environments are produced by environing technologies – those that shape and structure the way in which “nature” becomes “environment,” to be used, perceived and understood. These technologies are terraforming practices, materially and conceptually, and attending to them enables us to see environmental change on multiple scales and in new registers. This seminar reflects on the history of the concept of environing technologies, following the influential article in History and Technology which instituted it (written with Nina Wormbs). It revisits and extends this exploration of the conceptual, epistemological, economic and emotional appreciation of the environing technologies which structure material change, particularly the notion that attending to the ways we articulate and comprehend the environment – through such technologies – is vital for envisioning the future transformations necessary for societies to overcome the ecological and climate crises.

Sverker Sörlin is professor of Environmental History at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He was a co-founder of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in 2012 and is also a member of the Center for Anthropocene History in the Division of History of Science, Technology at KTH. His book with Eric Paglia, Stockholm and the Rise of Global Environmental Governance: The Human Environment will appear in November 2024 with Cambridge University Press. He is an Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts led by Professor Warwick Anderson (Anthropology, SSPS).

Photo by USGS on Unsplash