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InSIS News
BRIGAID
In May, InSIS researcher Dr Rob Bellamy and Institute Director Prof Steve Rayner will begin working on a research project titled 'Bridging the Gap for Innovations in Disaster Resilience' (BRIGAID). Funded as part of the European Union Horizon 2020 programme, BRIGAID aims to provide structural and ongoing support for innovations in climate adaption by developing an innovative mix of methods and tools that should become a standard for climate adaption innovations. BRIGAID will be led by Delft University of Technology and brings together researchers from over 20 research organisations across the world.
InSIS Welcomes Michael Gilmont and the DeFWS Project
In April, InSIS welcomed Oxford researcher Dr Michael Gilmont who will be working with Steve Rayner on the project 'Decoupling Food and Water Security in a Middle-East in Flux - Insights from Israel and Transferable Lessons for Jordan and Palestine' (DeFWS). DeFWS is a joint project between Oxford, the WANA Institute - a policy think tank based in Amman, Jordan - and EcoPeace Middle East - an environmental organisation with offices in Amman, Bethlehem, and Tel-Aviv. It is funded by the British Council Israel.
InSIS Seminar Series begins 3 May
The first of the InSIS Seminar Series, Anthropological Approaches to Technics, will be held on Tuesday, May 3, at 3pm in the Seminar Room, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford. The lecture is titled 'An Algorithmic Imaginary: Anticipation and Stupidity
' and will be presented by Dr Sam Kinsley of the University of Exeter.
More information>
InSIS at RAI Conference in May
Sophie Haines will co-convene a panel at the forthcoming Royal Anthropological Institute conference, to be held 27-29 May at the British Museum. The theme of the conference is Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change. Sophie's panel will be held on 28 May and is on 'Knowing the atmosphere: exploring conceptual and practical dimensions of weather and climate knowledge for environmental decision-making'. Sophie will also present a paper as part of the panel on her work undertaken in Belize as part of the OMPORS research project. Steve Rayner will act as a discussant, as well as chair of the keynote address and will participate in a plenary presentation of the American Anthropological Association.
Rob Bellamy at Linköping University
From 26-29 April, Dr Rob Bellamy is visiting colleagues at Linköping University, Sweden. During the visit, Rob will present a higher seminar on 'Assessing and Governing Climate Engineering'.
Intellectual Property and Politics of Knowledge workshop
On May 20 InSIS Deputy Director, Dr Javier Lezaun, will participate in the workshop Intellectual Property and the Politics of Knowledge, at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London.
Drought workshop report
Last year, on 17 March 2015, Sophie Haines and Steve Rayner participated in a workshop on 'Drought: understanding and reducing vulnerability through monitoring and early warning systems' at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford. This workshop was organised by the DrIVER and IMPETUS research projects. Sophie is a co-author on the workshop report which is now available here.
Heatwave Seminar
On March 14, Sophie Haines participated in the annual Public Health England Heatwave Plan Seminar. Topics of discussion this year included heat risk mapping, overheating in care homes and clinical settings, and overheating in the community. Sophie facilitated an afternoon breakout session discussing community resilience.
Dr Lezaun on mosquitos and malaria research
On March 30, Javier Lezaun spoke to the STS group at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government about his current work on the experimental study of mosquitos and malaria research.
Climate engineering in Nature Climate Change
Research work by Dr Rob Bellamy on the field of climate engineering has been featured in a retrospective article for Nature Climate Change to mark the journal's fifth anniversary.
Read here>
Upcoming Events
New InSIS Seminar Series - Anthropological Approaches to Technics
A great variety of approaches are available to understand how technics intersect with society at different scales, recruiting cosmologies, knowledge, bodies, and materials in the process. This seminar series invites anthropologists and social scientists to reflect on the anthropological study of technics and techniques, transforming observations from the field into engaging and original accounts about people and the worlds they inhabit.
More information about this seminar series will be posted at the InSIS website as it becomes available.
Date: Tuesdays, 3 May
Time:
3pm-5pm
Venue: Seminar Room, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX26PN
Special Seminar - The Many Pasts of Dolly: Working across mice, sheep and humans in Edinburgh, 1980-97
Seminar abstract:
The dramatic controversy around the cloning of Dolly the sheep tended to eclipse its original place within the research agenda at the Roslin Institute. Despite her celebrity, she was a side project within a long line of research into "biopharming", synthesising drugs in the milk of genetically modified sheep. The biopharming programme was one of the earliest examples of extending mammalian genetic engineering, first reported in mice in 1980, to farm animals. Roslin's precursor, the Animal Breeding Research Organisation (ABRO), had dealt with classical genetic research and designed breeding programmes, but shifted its focus towards biotechnology in the early 1980s as it was singled out for major downsizing during the first wave of Thatcher's cuts. In this crisis environment, molecular biologists were recruited and new institutional alliances forged, which affected ABRO's species make-up.
ABRO had routinely worked with sheep, pigs and cattle, although its methods had not been necessarily comparative. Introduction of molecular biology brought mice to the forefront, as both models for achieving genetic modification and as cheap and fast means of testing DNA constructs before proceeding to sheep. This arrangement had to be negotiated in a period of financial uncertainty, as mouse infrastructure had to be integrated with the world of experimental farms. Initially, humans featured as sources of DNA, as well as imagined patients. As the work became more public, journalists, ethicists and policy-makers also envisioned them as potential subjects of the very techniques the animals have been subject to, most dramatically after Dolly's birth. This presentation examines these
transitions across species at the levels of experiment and communication. As market incentives became dominant and public funding uncertain, novel arrangements to work across species had to be improvised, maintained or downplayed, resulting in alternative modes of comparative research.
Presented by:
Miguel Garcia-Sancho and Dmitriy Myelnikov (University of Edinburgh)
Date: Wednesday, 11 May
Time:
3pm-5pm
Venue: Seminar Room, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX26PN
Seminar flyer>
Publications
Journal Articles
Bellamy, R., and Lezaun, J. (2016) Crafting a public for geoengineering, Public Understanding of Science,
DOI: 10.1177/0963662515600965
Read>
Book Chapters
Heyward, C., Rayner, S. and Savulescu, J. (2016) Early geoengineering governance: The Oxford Principles. In: D. Kaplan and J.B. Callicott (eds.) Technology and the Environment., MIT Press: Cambridge MA.
Heyward, C. and Rayner, S. (2016) Apocalypse Nicked: Stolen Rhetoric in Geoengineering Advocacy. In: S. Crate and M. Nuttaall (eds.) Anthropology and Climate Change Second Edition, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
More info>
Other
Lezaun, J., and de Koning, C. (2015) Memorandum on regulatory pathways for genetically modified insects. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Genetically Modified Insects.
Read>
Benessia, A., Funtowicz, S., Giampietro, M., Guimarães Pereira, A., Ravetz, J., Saltelli, A., Strand, R., van der Sluijs, J. (2016) The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge, Published by The Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.
For a full list of publications visit: http://www.insis.ox.ac.uk/publications/
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