Cultural Spaces of Climate Network

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Contemporary debates over the threat of future climate change, coupled with the fixation on the apparent acceleration in anthropogenic global warming, and the general dominance of climatic modelling in climate change studies, have obscured the distinctive meaning that climate holds, and has held in the past, for different people in different places. Although there is a consensus that the global climate is changing, that human activities are exacerbating natural climatic variability, and that climate change will pose new and significant challenges for global society at large, the precise impacts for different social, economic and ecological systems are less clearly understood. It is essential to try to obtain a better understanding of how different groups of people in different contextual settings and at different points in time have conceptualised climate and have responded to its fluctuations. There have, therefore, been calls for a re-examination of climate change that i.) challenges the increasingly global and scientific perspective on climate and ii.) addresses the idea of climate and its culturally and spatially variable dimensions. Recent climate scholarship has, for example, highlighted a need to understand how different groups of people in different spatial and temporal contexts conceptualise climate as an idea. Efforts are thus now being made to explore how 'ordinary people' understand, talk or write about climate and make sense of it and to investigate climate as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of 'climate knowledge', all of which demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives afford. The purpose of the proposed network is to draw together academic researchers from within and beyond the arts and humanities, representatives from professional and learned societies including the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and various popular climate and weather related interest groups, including the Climatological Observers Link (COL), The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) and the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS), to investigate possible approaches to encourage a more culturally driven and local-scale consideration of climate as an idea from both an historical and contemporary perspective. Three workshops are proposed involving all these stakeholder groups. These will address a series of distinctive themes: i.) the potential contribution that arts and humanities approaches can make to contemporary climate and climate change discourses; ii.) the value of adopting an historical perspective in the investigation of the interrelationships between people, place and climate and of bringing historical materials into wider public and professional circulation to illustrate their use in developing narratives of climates past and present and iii.) the way in which the ordinary citizen, and amateur groups in particular, have in the past and could in the future usefully contribute to the production and circulation of climate knowledge, and to establish how they might become more involved as intermediaries between the public, academic and professional domains.