Location: Big seminar room, Teknikringen 74D (floor 5), Division of History of Science
Language: English
Siegfried Evens in front of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in the USA.
Teaser
That is why this dissertation will focus on exactly that: the water that runs through our nuclearpower plants. Water is so important and obvious to thesafetyof so many power plants–not onlynuclear ones–that it barely goes unnoticed. Indeed, the history of nuclear power contains a strikingparadox. Water is the key to a normal functioning nuclear power plant and to preventing nuclearaccidents. Yet, up until now, the history of water is largely absent from the history of nuclear power,and especially nuclear risk.Incontrast, there is a long–standing scholarly tradition of studyingnuclear fission and radioactivity.
Butthis dissertation is about more than just water. By focussing on water streams for the analysisof nuclear safety, other relevant elements open up aswell. While water streams are essential, thereis no nuclear power plant in the world that generates electricity because of it. Electricity is generatedbecause of the steam caused by the boiling of that water. The generation of steam is coupled to thescience and engineering practice of thermal–hydraulics–a field with a long and important history,dating back to the early days of industrialisation and mechanical engineering.
As I will show, muchengineering and political effort–in the nuclear sector and outside of it–hasbeen devoted tothemanagement of pressure and temperature in steam equipment, such as boilers and pipes. All ofthis was essential to prevent the pressure from mounting too high, causing catastrophic explosions.In turn, the management of all this water and steam is also very reliant on the material that thisequipment is made of. And that material is steel. A very robust material, steel is well–equipped to withstand the tremendous pressures and temperatures necessary to generate power. However, as withalmost any material, it can decay,crack,brittle, and break. A major theme in this dissertationwill therefore be the continued effort to improve and regulate steel–and the work of metallurgistsand material engineers in doing so. Streams, steams, and steels; that is in many ways the essence of this dissertation.
Excerpt from Siegfried’s final seminar text, pp. 12-13.
A pressure vessel at Shippingport Nuclear Power Station in the USA.
On 30 May, 1.15-2.45 pm, Alicia Gutting will have her final seminar with the title “The Nuclear Rhine” in her doctoral education. It will take place at the division, in the big seminar room. Alicia’s discussant is Timothy Moss, Senior Researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys), based at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
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On 02 June Ulrika Bjare will have her defence with the title “The autonomy of science – governance, organization, and enactment of university research”. It will take place at 10 am at KTH in Room B2, Brinellvägen 23 in Stockholm. Her Opponent is Charlotte Silander from Linnéuniversitetet. The defence will take place in Swedish.
Please be warmly welcome to attend Klara Müller’s mid-seminar in doctoral education, here at KTH Campus on Monday April 24.
The Qualitization of the Humanities: Changing Articulations of Research Quality
“Placed at the intersection between research policy, STS and the history of humanities, the project aims to analyze quality articulations on both the micro-level and the macro-level of the humanities since the 1980s. This is done through a combination of various methodological approaches such as archival research, oral history and bibliometrics.”
Doctoral student: Klara Müller, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH
Supervisor: Sverker Sörlin, KTH & Linus Salö, Stockholm University
Opponent: Vera Schwach, Doctor and Research Professor at NIFU, Nordisk Institutt for Studier av Innovasjon, Forskning og Utdanning
Time: Mon 2023-04-24 13.15 – 14.45 Location: the seminar room at the Division (Teknikringen 74 D, level 5) Language: English
Erik Isberg, doctoral student at the division, will discuss the progress of his dissertation at his final seminar on 13 March 13.15-15:00 (Stockholm time). The title of his seminar is “Planetary Timekeeping: Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge. 1950-1990”. Dania Acherman, Senior Scientist from the University of Bern, will act as discussant during the seminar. The event will be held in the seminar room at the division (Teknikringen 74D, level 5).
About Erik
I am a PhD Student at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment since December 2018. I hold a M.A in the History of Ideas and Sciences from Lund University and I was a visiting student at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at UC Berkeley 2016-2017.
As a part of the research project SPHERE, my current work concerns the scientific construction of a global environment and, particularly, how planetary timescales were increasingly incorporated into human history and global environmental governance between 1950-1980. As human impact on the environment began to be understood in planetary terms, practices aimed at tracking environmental changes over vast periods of time, such as ice core drilling and pollen analysis, were drawn into the political spotlight. They spoke to more than just the deep past, as they gradually became immersed in the work to predict, visualize and alter the trajectories of the living conditions on the planet. Over the course of a few decades, long planetary timescales had moved into the realm of the governable. I am interested in this process and the way environmental and societal temporalities have been synchronized, mediated and negotiated as a part of a larger shift in the human-earth relationship. More broadly, my research interests concern the history of science and technology, environmental humanities and historiography.
As part of the division’s Higher Seminar schedule for the upcoming spring term, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at Göteborg University Johan Söderberg will present his new book “Resistance to the Current. The Dialectics of Hacking” (MIT Press, Nov. 2022). Together with his co-author Maxigas, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media at Amsterdam University, our visitor investigated four historical case studies of hacker movements and their role in shaping a connected 21st century society.
Johan will visit us on 30 January, presenting at the higher seminar at 1.15-2.45pm, Stockholm time. The event is hosted in the seminar room at the division (Teknikringen 74 D, level 5). If you are interested, please come by and visit us!
Did you miss Rob Nixon and the Archipelago Lecture on November 10th? No worries! The recording is now up and can be watched below, with or without subtitles.
Abstract
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? Since the great recession of 2008, we have witnessed an upsurge in public science writing that has popularized research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the forest as collective intelligence.
This talk roots the current appeal of forest communication in a widespread discontent with neoliberalism’s antipathy to cooperative ways of being. Nixon argues that the science of forest dynamics offers a counter-narrative of flourishing, an allegory for what George Monbiot has called “private sufficiency and public wealth.
About Rob Nixon
Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, Orion, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere.
Environmental justice struggles in the global South are central to Nixon’s work. He is a particularly fascinated by the animating role that artists can play in relation to social movements.
Aliaksandr Piahanau and Per Högselius are organising an online workshop based at our division at KTH on 1 February 2023. Our colleagues are inviting scholars from around the world to discuss the “European Energy Shortages during the Short Coal Age (1869-1960)”. Of course, the workshop hits the zeitgeist, as current rearranging energy systems take discussions about fossil energy shortages in Europe to the forefront of the public discourse. Below you find the call for papers both as text and as a PDF for download. Please consider applying!
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Call for Papers for an online workshop at KTH Royal Institute of Technology
European Energy Shortages during the Short Coal Age
(1860-1960)
Figure 1. Primary Energy Consumption in Europe. Source: Fouquet (2016).
Date: 1 February 2023
Format: online
Objective: a workshop with the intention to produce a special issue or an edited volume
The winter of 2022-2023 in Europe may become the harshest since 1944 due to fuel and electricity scarcity. This is an obvious moment for revisiting historical energy shortages. The proposed workshop will target the period of repeated fuel shortages in Europe from roughly 1860 to 1960 – the century during which coal dominated European energy supply. Throughout this period coal supplied more than 50 % of all energy (figure 1).
Coal’s supremacy in the European energy balance peaked around the First World War. This dominance was enabled by a small group of leading coal producers: Britain, Germany, and, later, Poland, which exported the fuel to a range of other countries in Europe and beyond. British coal production peaked in 1913 (at nearly 300 million tons) and the number of coal miners reached its maximum in 1919 (at over 1 million). The peak was followed by rapid decline. Germany and other coal-producing countries went down the same path later on. For Europe as a whole, however, coal consumption peaked only in the 1960s (figure 2), after which coal lost its dominant position to oil and gas in relative terms as well. From the 1960s, the European coal consumption entered a lengthy period of decline. We propose to label the period during which coal dominated European energy use – from around 1860 to 1960 – “the Short Coal Age,” challenging the more commonly used periodization in the focus is traditionally on the (Long) Coal Age and its links with the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Steam.
Figure 2. Estimation of energy consumption in Terawatt-hours provided by coal in Europe. Source: OurWorldInData.org
Long-term data on coal consumption and prices show big fluctuations in European coal markets, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. High demand frequently encountered low supply, creating a classical “shortage” situation. Some of the mismatches between demand and supply had disastrous consequences for Europe, as reflected in contemporary public discussions (figure 3). Yet energy historians have so far not addressed the nature of European coal shortages sufficiently. In both scholarly and recent public debates historical coal shortages remain largely overshadowed by the oil shocks of the 1970s. Only a few studies have examined coal scarcity (see, for example, Weiller 1940; Lemenorel 1981; Mayer 1988; Kapstein 1990; Izmestieva 1998; Triebel 2009; Chancerel 2012; Mathis 2018).
This gap calls for interdisciplinary and international research cooperation in order to assess the story of long-term energy shortages in Europe. The participants of the planned workshop are invited to reflect together upon coal shortages, their manifold faces and outcomes, during the centenarian apogee of King Coal’s rule in Europe. The workshop aims to bring together researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds, such as history, energy studies, international relations, the technological and environmental humanities, geography, economics, media studies and anthropology.
We propose to structure the workshop around three theoretical angles. The first angle is the discursive understanding of the shortage phenomena; the second relates to their temporal dynamics; the third concerns their spatial (and geopolitical) effects.
By the discursive angle we mean narratives, arguments and ideas provoked by questions like – what happens when our massive flow of cheap energy suddenly disappears? The British intellectual William S. Jevons warned in his Coal Question (1865) that the coal dependence will menace modern society in near future. Jevons feared that the approaching coal depletion would ruin the industrial way of life in Britain and its international position. Reflecting upon the ideas of scarcity in an industrialised economy, British English coined the term “shortage” as a synonym for “lack” and “scarcity” (used for the first time in 1868). For the next hundred years, this term became primarily used in relation to the lack of labour and of coal. In a retrospective analysis, historians confirmed the importance of shortages for the modern development. On the one hand, coal shortages (and price peaks) pushed energy transition, promoting oil, water power and gas technologies (Fouquet 2016). On the other hand, the ability to stop the coal distribution tremendously empowered modern workers. As Mitchell (2011) famously argued in Carbon Democracy, by menacing or performing “energy sabotage” by acting in the checkpoints of the fossil-fuel-based economy such as mines, railways and ports, coal professionals were able to secure more rights and freedom than any time before. We are interested in deepening this reflection by asking what kind of fears and hopes, challenges and opportunities, coal and its shortages provoked in different contexts.
Figure 3. Word frequency referring to coal shortage. Note the two major peaks in 1919 and 1946. The dates of the first visible peak surged in 1873 and the last in 1971 might serve as alternative brackets for the “Short Coal Age” in Europe. Source: Google books 2019 British English corpus.
Our second theoretical focus is chronological. The uncommon time-frame of 1860-1960 as a single European period offers a possibility to check the long-term patterns where researchers usually look for the discontinuity associated with the two world wars. The focus also reveals that the “Short Coal Age” was a paradoxical period from another point of view. The relative coal abundance between 1860 and 1960 was also perforated by repeated moments of drastic energy scarcity. Ethan B. Kapstein, for example, argued that the late World War II coal shortage in Europe was “the most devastating energy crisis in its modern history” (1990, 17). However, the coal undersupply of 1917-21, which occurred at the peak of European coal dependence, seems to have been even more serious. Smaller coal shortages struck in 1873-4, 1899-1903, 1926 and 1956. This uneven spread of coal shortages, which occurred in times of both peace and war, is another fascinating subject, and we aim to develop a chronological mapping of coal shortages in Europe.
Our third point targets the spatial dimension. Coal supply and its shortages affected different areas in varying degree and unevenly sparked both international competition and cooperation. By accident or not, the “Short Coal Age” in Europe was also a period of intense international confrontations and warfare. The half-century before 1914, when coal was exported in big volumes out of Europe, were the heydays of European imperialism in Africa and Asia. Coal exports assured British domination over the oceans through establishment of coaling stations, which led On Barak to propose the term “coalonialism” (2021). But since 1914, Europe cut its overseas coal exports, increasingly becoming a net coal importing region (figure 4). The two world wars demonstrated that modern total warfare was a kind of state-run competition of endurance, where home-front economy was as important as frontline combat. Military campaign devoured giant portions of energy and its success was largely defined by the amount of coal which one side could mobilize (Tooze 2007). The world wars brought new territorial rearrangements over important coal areas (such as Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and Silesia), but also sped up an international cooperation in coal supply on the European level. The Versailles conference of 1919-20 formalised a first international system of coal exchange, which was included in peace treaties (Soutou 1989). Dealing with the ruinous coal shortages, the winning coalitions established the European Coal Commission in 1919 (which later was integrated into the Economic Commission of the League of Nations), and the European Coal Organisation in 1945, later replaced by the much more powerful (and successful) European Community of Coal and Steel in 1951. The transition to an oil-and-gas economy in the 1960s not only freed Europe from the dictate of the coal mining industry, but also, possibly, left international conflicts over coalfields to the past – at least until 2014, when war broke out in Eastern Europe’s chief coal mining centre, located in Ukraine’s Donbass region.
Figure 4. Coal trade balance in Europe, in million ton (exports minus imports; without Russia and Turkey). Data sourced from: B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, Europe. 1750 – 1988. 3d edition. 1992, 465-72.
Most of all, we are interested in studies on coal supply breakdowns and how they affected European coal dependent actors, such as importing countries, industries and urban communities. International organisations or summits, dealing with coal shortages, are also relevant cases. Comparative studies juxtaposing different geographical, temporal or social cases, are particularly welcomed.
Researchers are invited to discuss one of the following topics:
Dynamics. What were the agents and structural forces underlying particular coal shortages? How did the coal shortages directly affect actors and society?
Adaptations. Which strategies were considered and tested in order to improve the energy situation and/or overcome the crisis? What were the short- and long-term results?
Wider impact. Which changes did coal shortages bring in power, economy and social structures? Who were the winners and losers, who was not affected and why? What kind of challenges and opportunities did coal shortages create? How was the European environment affected by energy shortages and attempts to overcome it?
Revelations. How did people understand coal shortages in broader sense? Were coal shortages integrated into a particular narrative or political discourse? To what extent did these shortages affect the dominant ideological assumptions?
Expectations. How did actors and society forecast future coal supply? Which measures were taken in order to avoid new shortages? How effective were these measures during coal shortages?
The workshop is planned to be held online on 1 February 2023. Interested researchers are invited to submit a paper proposal (up to 500 words) and a short bio to Aliaksandr Piahanau (piahanau@gmail.com) by 15 November 2022. Selected speakers will then be asked to submit full papers (up to 8,000 words including references) by 15 January 2022. After the workshop, we hope to turn its papers into a special issue for a major peer-reviewed academic journal, or, alternatively, into an edited volume.
Organisers: Aliaksandr Piahanau, postdoc researcher in energy history (piahanau@gmail.com) and Per Högselius, professor of history of technology (perho@kth.se), KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
We are happy to announce that the next Stockholm Archipelago Lecture is coming up on 10 November 2022 at 5pm (Stockholm time). Rob Nixon is going to give his presentation titled “The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life”. Feel free to join digitally! You find the link below.
Abstract:
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? Since the great recession of 2008, we have witnessed an upsurge in public science writing that has popularized research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the forest as collective intelligence.
This talk roots the current appeal of forest communication in a widespread discontent with neoliberalism’s antipathy to cooperative ways of being. Nixon argues that the science of forest dynamics offers a counter-narrative of flourishing, an allegory for what George Monbiot has called “private sufficiency and public wealth.
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Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, Orion, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere.
Environmental justice struggles in the global South are central to Nixon’s work. He is a particularly fascinated by the animating role that artists can play in relation to social movements.
Missing in-depth conversations about important movies? Do you want to know more about Sami culture and history or about resource extraction in the deep sea? Have you ever heard a joik?
On September 1st, Crosscuts – Stockholm’s first environmental humanities film festival – will return! Through documentaries, poetry and conversations between leading researchers, filmmakers, students and artists, we explore different themes. This year we delve into deep sea mining, environmental activism and the green movement and Sami culture and the climate crisis. Everything happens on site at KTH, in Stockholm.
The program offers, among other things, the artistic documentary series What is Deep Sea Mining? (directors: Inhabitants with Margarida Mendes), the Greenpeace film How to change the world (director: Jerry Rothwell) and the acclaimed documentary about Britta Marakatt-Labba Historjá – Stygn för Sapmí (director: Thomas Jackson).
Among the invited panelists are Thomas Jackson, director, Gunhild Rosqvist, professor, Staffan Lindberg, climate journalist at Aftonbladet and Ylva Gustafsson, activist, folk educator and stage artist, who will also perform a joik for us. A joik is a traditional form of song in Sámi music performed by the Sámi people of Sapmi in Northern Europe and it is also one of the oldest vocal traditions in Europe.
During the evening we have with us the ecopoets Evelyn Reilly and Juan Carlos Galeano who will perform their poetry via link, and then participate in a conversation with the audience.
The event is held in English. Participation is free of charge, but the number of seats is limited and therefore advance registration is required.
Welcome to a day full of documentary films, panel discussions and performance!
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Crosscuts
Crosscuts is an international festival for film, art and research in the environmental humanities. Each film is shown together with a panel discussion with specially invited guests. The festival is organized this year by the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) in collaboration with Stockholm University. Crosscuts was organized for the first time in 2018.
Rather than perpetuating the conventional academic mode of compartmentalizing knowledge, separating theory and practice, and adopting a hierarchized and exclusive treatment of the visual and the verbal, your events were made to bring scholars and artists together and to speak to both in the vibrant questions they raised with their researches.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmaker, writer and professor at the University of California Berkeley
Crosscuts comes across as a cutting-edge bridge between academia, the art world, and the public sphere. This is eminently in line with KTH’s best traditions; the school’s motto famously brings together science and art.
Jan Olsson, professor emeritus of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University
This Stockholm Environmental Humanities Festival for Film and Text that was held for the first time in the fall of 2018, was an extremely successful and important event for both academic community and the general public.
Madina Tlostanova, professor in postcolonial feminism, Linköpings University.
What is Deep Sea Mining? is a five episode short film series dedicated to the topic of deep sea mining, a new frontier of resource extraction at the bottom of the ocean, set to begin in the next few years. It is also one of the head events of the third edition of Crosscuts – Stockholm Environmental Humanities Festival for Film and Text on September 1st this fall.
What is Deep Sea Mining? will start up the festival this year. The five episodes are screened at a brownbag seminar and followed by a discussion lead by the Divison’s Tirza Myer. In the panel we have Robert Blasiak, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (focuses on the sustainable management of ocean resources, and ocean stewardship) and Staffan Lindberg, author and journalist at Swedish paper Aftonbladet (focuses on foreign and climate news).
The What is Deep Sea Mining? project was developed in collaboration with Margarida Mendes, curator, educator and activist from Lisbon, Portugal. Margardia is a founding member of Oceano Livre, the environmental movement against deep sea mining. She is dedicated to understand how a shifting climate impacts society’s capacity for imagination. We will also show a recording of Margarida during this event.
Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.