Co-director of the ScienceHumanities initiative, Dr Jamie Castell, is currently organising an international event on ‘Transnational Conceptions of Nature and Ecology’ at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science with Dr Wilko von Hardenberg.

In our current moment, complex environmental challenges have causes and effects that clearly exceed national boundaries. Nevertheless, historical and contemporary conceptions of nature and ecology remain influenced by national and transnational cultures. This one-day symposium aims to investigate the connections and faultlines between different understandings of nature and ecology in national and global contexts. In the morning, we will consider the entangled cultures of geographically proximate European countries, which have shaped many dominant approaches to nature in science and society. In the afternoon session, we will turn our attention to different conceptions of nature and ecology on a more global scale. By offering a survey of different conceptions of nature and ecology, we hope to make productive connections, to highlight the limitations and mediations of current approaches, and to consider together the impact of these approaches on different disciplines and modes of thinking in our own time.

The event will take place in Berlin in December 2018 with invited speakers from around the world.