We are calling for submissions for the following open panel at the 4S 2018 conference in Sydney, 29 August - 1 September:
Open panel 42
TITLE: Flammable futures: encountering combustion in a changing climate
CONVENERS: Timothy Neale, Deakin University; Lauren Rickards, RMIT
ABSTRACT: There are growing signs that the incidence and severity of wildfires are increasing due to climate change. This issue is compounded in many fire-prone countries – including Australia, Chile, Canada, Portugal and the US – by increasing enclosure within forest interfaces. Such trends not only raise questions about the sustainability of life in the spaces where ‘fuels’ and human populations intermingle but also, more broadly, how we should coexist with combustion on an increasingly flammable planet. Humans have ‘appropriated and advanced a technics that was the planet’s own,’ as Nigel Clark notes, forcing global changes through a capacity for combustion.
In line with STS’s commitment to understanding science and scientific knowledge as situated, this panel seeks contributions that consider how our knowledge of combustions’ present and future are being assembled. Possible topics include: combustion and markets; quantifying combustion; cultures of combustion; distributing combustion risks; and, the biomedical consequences of combustion.
This raises a broader set of questions about how our lives are entangled with these and other combustive practices that condition the planet’s flammability. For proof of these entanglements we might look not only to the ongoing extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, but also the broad-scale fires intentionally lit by agriculturalists to aid food and commodity production. We might look, more microscopically, to the carcinogens that various combustive arrangements sediment into our lungs and bloodstreams. Linking all of these concerns is the question of how combustion is rendered discursively and materially containable.
More info at:
https://4s2018sydney.org/call-for-papers-open-panels/ and
https://4s2018sydney.org/Dr Timothy Neale
Research Fellow | Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation
Deakin University | Melbourne | Australia
