Climate Histories: Communicating Cultural Knowledge of Environmental Change

A 12-month Network beginning in May 2010, funded by the AHRC through the Arts and Humanities Approaches to Researching Environmental Change Networks competition

This Network speaks to the theme of Histories of Environmental Change by asking how people around the world perceive, narrate, and frame changes in their environment and climate. How can such accounts be gathered methodologically and what challenges does their interpretation raise? It aims to make a major contribution to academic debates on environmental change, by making a cross-cultural explanation of the ways in which environmental knowledge practices, apprehensions of risk in terms of future-oriented strategies and decision-making processes are informed by understanding of past process. In its call, the AHRC poses these 2 questions: •  How can histories of environmental change engage effectively with current concerns about recent events and future scenarios? These include histories tracing continuity as well as transformation over the long term and shorter term histories focused on specific, perhaps extreme, environmental events. •  How are environmental histories produced, at an academic and popular level? What are the issues of evidence (including oral and archival sources), of explanation (including narrative and diagrams) and position (including the particular sites on which histories are based and the venues in which they are produced)? In order to answer these questions, we will focus on: methodological challenges; perceiving change over time; nodes of communication/miscommunication; and an anthropology of interdisciplinary climate research.