Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. Deborah R. Coen argues that this history has its roots in the politics of empire-building in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy.
The statistical imagination of the west in the nineteenth century created the conditions of social classification whose ramifications we are still dealing with today. This workshop begins the hard task of unpacking this late nineteenth-century nexus, challenging in particular its data legacies. What conditions underwrote these codifications of race, gender, and development? What do they tell us about the prehistory of data in the centuries before, and what are the consequences of that transformation today?
Perhaps ironically, in being able to identify vanilla as present but absent, it is possible to refuse to accept it as boring, white, or absent.
Stanford Humanities Center
