Paper short abstract:

Against standardised metrology, ‘lay metrology’ spans affect and narrative. ‘Size of Wales’ illustrates how lay units mediate cultural identity. Combining formal and lay scales to measure the physico-social extent of ecological damage, we ask inventive questions that embrace the Chthulucene.

Paper long abstract:

If metrology entails the standardisation of units not least for the purposes of various mathematical operations, ‘lay metrology’ entails units whose interconnections are more overtly multiple spanning the affective, the aesthetic, the narrative, the cultural and the sensorial. Illustrating this with the ‘Vague Ruler’, the paper will specifically examine how ‘area’ measured in standardised units (specifically as applied to environmental devastation) can be translated into folk units. Drawing on the charity ‘Size of Wales’, the paper discusses the ways in which the unit of ‘the size of Wales’ serves in narratively and affectively mediating cultural identity. The paper goes on to explore speculatively how one might go about bringing together - commoning - standardised and folk scales – that is, institutionalised and lay metrologies in order to invent ‘hybrid scales’ that might be used in ‘measuring’, for example’ the ‘physico-social’ extent of environmental damage. The aim of this exercise is to at once illuminate the implicit functioning of formal metrologies (and their tacit affectivities) and allow for the development of more ‘interesting questions’, including those that embrace such hopeful futures as the Chthulucene.