Climate risk: historical reflections on a vulnerable science

• Department of History

Deborah Coen, Professor of History and Chair of the Program in History of Science & Medicine at Yale University, will give a talk hosted by the EUI History of Science and Medicine Working Group.

This presentation uses history to illuminate a profound misalignment between today’s science of climate change and the goals of climate justice. A fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of the current scientific discourse around human "vulnerability" to climate change. This presentation argues that the scientists who set out in the late 1970s to study human vulnerability to climate change ended up — ironically and largely unintentionally — constructing an ideal of climatic invulnerability. To diagnose this problem, I draw on a diverse set of late twentieth-century feminist thinkers who critiqued a tendency within "Western thought" to idealise invulnerability. In doing so, I also hope to situate these feminist thinkers as historical actors within a long history of confronting—and denying—the vulnerability of humans to the atmosphere.

Please register in order to get a seat or the ZOOM link.