[Coral-List] Interdisciplinary Marine Workshop - April 2023, Exeter(UK)/online

[Jones, Elis]

Dear All
Find below information on an interdisciplinary workshop running in Exeter (UK) and online in April - several of the talks will be directly relevant to coral reef research.
Many thanks
Elis

Workshop and Public Talk - Science Studies and Marine Biology - University of Exeter/Online - 27-28th April 2023.
In April the University of Exeter's Egenis Centre for the Study of Life Sciences will host a free interdisciplinary marine workshop bringing together marine scientists and scholars from history, philosophy and social studies of science. This will also include a public talk by Prof. Stefan Helmreich (MIT). Both the workshop and public talk will also be streamed online. Please contact Elis Jones (erj205 at exeter.ac.uk) if you have any questions. For titles of talks, more information and registration see www.marinesciencestudies.co.uk<http://www.marinesciencestudies.co.uk>.

Workshop: Values at Sea - Science Studies meets Marine Biology
27-28th April, University of Exeter and via Zoom.

Description:
Across many disciplines, attention is increasingly focused on the sea. This is no surprise: it is a site of immense value, supporting and shaping the global biosphere, and is under considerable threat. Whilst ocean ecosystems are pushed to the brink, scholars now often talk of the blue humanities and oceanic turns, of blue economics and accelerations, and of ocean decades. These trends necessitate a similar refocusing towards the sea in the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, fields that are well placed to help understand and contextualise some of the changes occurring to marine systems. To facilitate the emergence of social studies of marine life, as well as the integration of such scholarship with biological and ecological research, this two-day seminar will bring together people engaged in and focused on interactions between scientists and the sea. The discussion will centre on values in marine contexts: that is, the ways in which oceans and ocean life come to matter to humans and other species.
By bringing together those working within marine sciences, those studying the work done in those sciences, and those offering other perspectives on the sea, we aim to nurture and strengthen cross-disciplinary understandings of how the ocean is, has been, and can be valued. Speakers from ecology and social sciences will present work on the biology and ecology of the sea and its interactions with people, as well as from science studies to discuss how knowledge and value are produced in these contexts.
Registration here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/523035532357

Public Talk: Ocean Waves, Ocean Science, Ocean Media - Prof. Stefan Helmreich, MIT
28th April, 9:30-11:00am, University of Exeter and via Zoom.

Description:
How do oceanographers apprehend ocean waves? This presentation draws on anthropological work I undertook among wave scientists in the United States to argue that what oceanographers take ocean waves to be has been strongly imprinted by the techniques, technologies, and media - maritime, photographic, filmic, information theoretic - through which waves have come to be known. I offer an account of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted on board the Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP), a seagoing vessel managed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in La Jolla, California. FLIP is a singular vessel, one that, once at sea, can "flip" 90 degrees into a vertical position -with all the instrumentation inside swiveling correspondingly-to become a stable platform from which to measure wave action. Moving from an examination of the contemporary use of infrared and laser imaging to study waves from FLIP, I place the platform within a longer history of wave science, reaching back into the Cold War, when ocean observation projects were conditioned by nuclear-age American maritime expansion, particularly in the Pacific. I then flip to the recent present, as scientists turn from understanding waves not only as a kind of infrastructure for maritime networks, but also as avatars of anthropogenic climate change.
Register here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/522142531367

These events are supported by South West Doctoral Training Partnership, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action 885794, the Egenis Centre for the Study of Life Sciences and the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.

Elis Jones
PhD Student
Understanding Coral Value Project
Egenis Centre, University of Exeter