Over the past two decades, the concept of human vulnerability to climate change has become foundational to both academic research and movements for climate justice. Yet the notion of climatic vulnerability is shot through with contradictions. Viewed historically, it embeds three distinct concepts—sensibility, risk, and resilience—which emerged in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, respectively, and which survive today in tension with each other. This project reinterprets the history of the scientific study of the atmosphere through the lens of recent feminist and psychoanalytic theory, aiming to elucidate how metrics of vulnerability do and do not serve the goals of climate justice today.
This talk will focus on the moment circa 1800 when the study of atmospheric sensibility was reoriented around the concept of risk. When the Habsburgs began their colonial experiment in the former Ottoman territory of the Banat, they committed themselves to mitigating the dreaded effects of the region’s bad air on German-speaking settlers. Vienna thus became the headquarters of an influential early modern research program on the susceptibility of humans to atmospheric forces. Among its outcomes we might count key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contributions to the chemistry of the atmosphere, alongside new technologies of indoor heating and ventilation. Physicians and physicists confronted the universality of vulnerability to atmospheric forces, shedding new light on the sensitive dependence of living things on the air within and around them. Yet these same researchers resolved to harness these aerial forces, to wield them as tools of healing and industry, and so to distance themselves from populations newly categorized as at risk. In the process, they replaced an eighteenth-century notion of universal vulnerability to the atmosphere with a hierarchical, gendered theory of pathological atmospheric sensitivity, a connotation that continues to color the concept of climate vulnerability today.
Please register in order to get a seat or the ZOOM link.