Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Examining the principles and rich history of Sri Lankan vernacular architecture, its global impact during colonization, and its untapped potential in addressing modern global sustainability challenges.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores the evolution of Sri Lankan vernacular architecture, tracing its 2,500-year history and its impact on global built environmental practices. Ancient Sri Lankan architecture, evident in monasteries and palaces, displayed advanced infrastructure, such as gravel roads, reservoirs, and innovative engineering. Notable examples include the water fountains at Sigiriya Rock and the 87 km canal, "Yoda Ela." Monasteries featured sophisticated wastewater systems, while rivers served as crucial transportation routes.

The study investigates the influence of the "vaasthu" principles, widely adopted in Sri Lanka and India, on planning and built environments. These principles encompass auspicious construction times, solar orientation, material selection, and anthropometric considerations. Traditional practices, like spatial division, door/window placement, and passive climate control, anticipated modern sustainability challenges.

Despite the global climate crisis and calls for cradle-to-cradle cycles, these principles were addressed in Sri Lanka's local context long ago, offering a potential solution to global issues. Colonization introduced Dutch and British architectural influences, which intertwined with Sri Lankan traditions, disseminating knowledge, particularly in irrigation and building systems. This research examines the transformation of global built environment trends before and after colonization, shedding light on knowledge transfer. Nevertheless, a substantial reservoir of untapped wisdom from Sri Lankan vernacular architecture remains to be explored and could provide solutions to contemporary global challenges.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the work of technicians in the Nairobi remote sensing sector during the 1970s. Their trajectories help to explain the unequal processes of environmental knowledge production during a period when the notion of a ‘global’ environment gained currency.

Paper long abstract:

While histories of ‘worldmaking’ in the 1970s (through movements like the New World Information and Communication Order) have gained prominence in recent years, the insights of this research have not been brought to bear on histories of how the environment ‘became global’ in the same period. The interests of newly independent states and their citizens were fundamental to the day-to-day production of data as well as the narrative of a shared human existence. Far from being mere recipients of technology and expertise, scientists and technicians in regions such as East Africa navigated the processes of knowledge production that have defined our contemporary understanding of the environment.

Based on preliminary archival work, I will present a case study of East African technicians working in the remote sensing sector – where, since the 1970s, image-based data of the earth’s surface has been produced by satellites and interpreted by specialists in fields from agriculture to forestry. Nairobi is a continental hub for remote sensing, framing its work squarely within the remit of ‘sustainable development’ and adaptation to climate change. But its history predates these ideas, extending to colonial cartography and more concretely to the founding of the Regional Centre for Services in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing in 1974 – two years after Nairobi was chosen for UNEP headquarters. Inventorying and distributing resources was a major stake in independence struggles; collaboration with international organisations, coordinated regionally, appeared a way to meet society’s expectations of the postcolonial future.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyse the case of international astronomy in Chile and Australia during the 1960s. Its main focus will be on how the Cold War environment intersected these projects, influencing their significance for global astronomy and shaping our understanding of concepts such as the "South."

Paper long abstract:

One of the characteristics of astronomy is its undeniable global nature. Perhaps this can be attributed to its long-standing internationalism tradition, but more evidently, it arises from the fact that stars, galaxies, nebulae, and any other celestial phenomena are not subject to any national or earthly organization, ownership, or sovereignty claims. Despite this condition, astronomical observation generally require carefully chosen locations on Earth (except for current space telescopes). Up until the 1960s, astronomy was primarily developed in the northern hemisphere, which hosted the most powerful telescopes. However, this scenario changed in the 1960s, In the 1960s as the United States, USSR, and European countries sought to build their own observatories in the southern hemisphere. South Africa, Chile, and Australia were possible candidates for this endeavour. A Cold War environment intersected with the need for southern observatories, as this location allowed reaching portions of the sky not visible from the northern hemisphere. For centuries, the imagery of the South portrayed it as lagging behind in terms of cutting-edge science and technology, fuelling its ongoing desires for modernization. Suddenly the South became crucial, and astronomy played a significant role in reshaping the landscape of science and technology there, particularly from the 1960s onward. This paper will address the case of astronomy in Chile and Australia during the 1960s, examining their global significance and how they influenced the evolving geographical and symbolic interpretations of the concept of “the South”.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the Agro-Economic Survey, a late 1960s effort by social scientists at Indonesia's two largest agricultural universities to render rural Indonesia "more" legible. This survey grappled with the contradictions of agricultural modernization during an important political juncture.

Paper long abstract:

Rural Indonesia remains characterized by significant inequality and injustice. On the one hand, levels of agricultural productivity have increased over decades, boosting exports especially of oil palm and leading to approximately 90% self-sufficiency in rice, the country’s most significant food staple. Nevertheless, the benefits of this reality are not well distributed amongst Indonesia’s rural population today. In this presentation, I explain how important characteristics of the country’s contemporary agricultural economy are linked to intellectual battles that involved social scientists associated with Indonesia’s two largest agricultural universities, Bogor Agricultural University and University of Gadjah Mada. I focus on their involvement with the Agro-Economic Survey, an effort during the late 1960s that attempted to derive robust methodologies to measure rural development. Importantly, even as this effort to “improve” how rural landscapes and rural populations were rendered legible to the state began in the late 1960s as the right-wing regime of President Suharto intensified, it brought together experts of meaningful ideological diversity. I argue that these debates were not primarily aimed at developing neutral ways of measuring and classifying rural change. Rather, they allowed for different visions of agricultural modernization, and ultimately agrarian democracy to be articulated. In effect, the Agro-Economic Survey was a crucial site to define the proper role of scientific knowledge and the state in rural Indonesia. The contradictions of the Indonesian agricultural economy today therefore stem in part from unresolved questions regarding the relationship between intellectuals and rural society as well as the nature of legitimate rural statecraft.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines knowledge-policy responses in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa to the biophysical impacts of nitrogen in human ecologies. It asks how the knowledge-policy interface in postcolonial nations has responded to the rise of nitrogen as a global and planetary governance problem.

Paper long abstract:

The intensive use of chemical fertilizers, rapid urbanization, and fossil fuel and biomass burning, among other human activities, have dramatically increased global anthropogenic reactive nitrogen (Nr) emissions since the 1960s. These actives have modified the global nitrogen cycle and impacted biogeochemical processes critical to sustaining life on Earth. As Nr compounds accumulate, circulate, and convert into various reactive forms—nitrous oxide (N2O), nitrate (NO3-), nitrogen oxides (NOx), nitrite (NO2-), ammonia (NH3), and ammonium (NH4+)—, they intensify multiple socio-ecological effects transcending disciplinary, national, and ecological boundaries.

National and intergovernmental organizations, including the recent United Nations Resolution on Sustainable Nitrogen Management (UNEA 5.2), have adopted nitrogen as a critical socio-environmental issue and a fundamental piece in achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, impacts, knowledge, policy responses, and social demands have grown unequally. Scientific networks and institutions in the Global South have historically been unable to participate on equal terms.

This paper examines developing and postcolonial nation’s knowledge and policy responses to the nitrogen challenge in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It asks: how have scientific networks, institutions, and communities in these regions experienced and responded to the rise of nitrogen as a global governance problem and the biophysical effects of Nr compounds on humans and ecologies? What tensions emerge between global governance and local, national, and subnational arenas? And finally, how do processes of the knowledge-policy interface in postcolonial nations reshape and contest the language and metrics of global governance and planetary stewardship?