Description
In recent years, a burgeoning and medially diverse literature on natural history heritage, conservation, climate change and the role of women in Earth Sciences has sought to widen the remit of what it means to be environmentally literate in South Asia and beyond. Our roundtable builds on these recent developments to discuss how knowledge about the natural world travels (or not) across different registers of presentation and identify opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration between historians of science, scientists, authors and media practitioners. Using examples from our own work, we show that processes of knowledge making and science communication about the environment often cross regional, disciplinary and mediatic borders: the history of palaeontology in India can be told from the perspective of trans-imperial fossil collections in Britain, Germany, the US and Japan, but also through a film on Indian dinosaurs and the fantastic story of Padma and her bluethingosaurus friend; interviews with marine conservationists acquire a life of their own as instruments of public outreach, as they are weaved into popular science writing and children’s books; while practitioners’ stories from India and several African countries can be used to gauge women’s experiences of technoscience and the environment. Sharing fieldnotes and photographs of fossils, reading excerpts from their books and screening film segments, the four panelists aim to engage the audience in a conversation about the ups and downs of documenting environmental histories, striking the right balance between science and storytelling and striving to reach wider publics.| Period | 5 Jul 2023 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |