HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT WORKSHOP

The laboratory is designed for the Bachelor's degree. It will be structured in seminars that will require the active participation of students through the readings of texts, short presentations and critical discussions. During the laboratory, we will make use of written as well as visual sources and material culture, e.g. museum objects from online databases, which will stimulate students to find new strategies for constructing a historical narrative about the global mobility of knowledge, people, ideas, and production models.

At the end of this laboratory, students will have acquired key competences (methodological as much as content-related) to orient themselves in the study of the history of science and environmental history, as well as of its sources, from the 1960s up to nowadays. This will allow them to address more complex readings on the topic.

There are no prerequisites for this course. However, since the most innovative and less Eurocentric texts on environmental history are English, so a passive knowledge of the English language is encouraged.

This laboratory focuses on the environmental history of science. It aims to create a context for discussion on the subject of the circulation and mobility of knowledge between the early modern age and the end of the 18th century. By knowledge we mean the areas, then disciplines, of natural history, mineralogy, medicine, engineering, and hydraulics. These models are also, but not only, constituted in relation to the need of European states, and their institutions, to better manage natural resources in the Mediterranean and Atlantic spaces. The various sessions will problematise the exchange of knowledge on a global scale (Europe, the Americas, South-East Asia) after 1492, highlighting the power dynamics underlying the mobility of people, objects and know-how. On a broader level, the workshop will explore the political, economic and social aspects intrinsic to knowledge production processes, while at the same time questioning Eurocentric narratives. It will also dig into the implications, social, political and scientific, of the ecological transformations operated by Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonists in South America as much as in South East Asia, and analyse the theological and rational imaginaries connected to the explanation of natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, epidemics). Even though the chronology of this laboratory will be related to the early modern period, many of the case studies taken into account will offer perspectives on the relationship between human beings and nature at our age.

Some of texts which will read and use in class:

Marco Armiero e Stefania Barca, Storia dell'Ambiente (Carocci, Roma 2004)

Rachel Carson, Primavera Silenziosa (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1994)

Carla Benedetti, La letteratura ci salverà dall'estinzione; Torino: Einaudi 2021

Amitav Ghosh, La Maledizione della noce moscata. Parabole per un pianeta in crisi (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2022)



Carolyn Merchant, La Morte della Natura. Donne Ecologia e Rivoluzione Scientifica (Editrice Bibliografica, Milano 2022)

Jessica Hernandez, Fresh Banana Leaves. Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley 2022).

Sidney Mintz, Storia dello Zucchero. Tra politica e cultura (Einaudi 2020)

Giuseppe Olmi, L’Inventario del Mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Il Mulino 1992)

Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 (New York 2007) in particolare l’introduzione (pp.1-27)

Giorgio Riello, Objects in Motion: Mobility, Connectivity, and the Imaginary in Early Modern Global Things’, in Encounters at Sea: Paper, Objects and Sentiments in Motion Across the Mediterranean, exh. catalogue by Giovanni Tarantino, Giorgio Riello and Jose Maria Perez Fernandez (Bandecchi & Vivaldi 2020), pp. 31-43.

There will be no final assessment, but I will ask students to write a short paper on a theme or case study of their choice. I will encourage them to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, make sound arguments through the use of historical sources (written, visual and material). Students will be asked to give short presentations throughout the laboratory, and essays will be based on these.

The laboratory will consist in lectures, with the use of ppt and images (and videos!) The first ten/fifteen minutes of each lecture will be dedicated to summarise the main themes of the previous lecture and to announce the themes on the lecture of the day. I will then give a presentation and ask students to intervene and engage in the reading of texts and the interpretation of images and short videos. I have conceived this course as hybrid in terms of teaching methods, alternating moments in which I will be speaking, and moments in which students will be involved, individually or in groups (this of course will depend on how many of you will come). We will read historical sources, secondary literature but also watch some videos and short films relevant to understand some of the themes addressed in the laboratory (i.e. extractive colonialism and ecocide)

Italian

The students who have attended the course but haven't obtained the qualification can obtain it in subsequent exam sessions by making a request to the professor, who will decide on a case by case basis.

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Climate change and energy" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development