Friday 30 May 2014

Eunice Blavascunas on "Signals in the Forest: Postsocialist Scientific Legitimacy in Poland's Bialowieza Forest"

A Lunchtime Colloquium at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich
05.06.2014 12:00  – 14:00 
Location: Katholische Hochschulgemeinde (KHG), Leopoldstr. 11
Credibility contests about what nature is doing are rarely won by science alone because science is a cultural activity. In Europe’s last low-land old growth forest, the Bialowieza Forest in eastern Poland, which experts do people trust when those experts speak about the compositions of plants and animals that belong there? Which experts have they trusted in the post-socialist era? Intense debates about the ontology of the forest prefigure how the forest can be managed and in this story inflect on the use of radio telemetry and western-produced media. Cultural stories about science help scholars understand the shortcuts people take in interpreting the scientific positions that fit their views as well as political, historical circumstances.

Eunice Blavascunas (College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, USA) will present on "Signals in the Forest: Postsocialist Scientific Legitimacy in Poland's Bialowieza Forest."

The Lunchtime Colloquium is free and open to the public.
Snacks are served at 12:00; the lecture starts at 12:30.

For more information on the Lunchtime Colloquium series, please click here.

The Country and the City: Connecting People and Their Places in Environmental History

This International Conference in Beijing is currently underway (29.05.2014 – 01.06.2014)
 
It is Co-Sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, and the Center for Ecological History, Renmin University of China
 

Do rural people live in harmony with each other and with nature? Are urban people alienated from the land and exploitative in their ecological behavior? These questions point to cultural myths that have persisted across time and space, from ancient China to modern Africa. This conference seeks to scrutinize such cultural perceptions, in the spirit of famed British cultural critic Raymond Williams, and at the same time examine the material connections that have long bound rural and urban habitats together. We are especially interested in comparative studies that cross national boundaries, in papers that bring neglected parts of the world into view, and in perspectives that extend back in time before the twentieth century.

The program (PDF, 76 KB) can be viewed on the website of the Rachel Carson Center.