The War of the Locust: science, politics, culture and collaboration in the Anti-Locust Research Centre, 1940-45

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Outbreaks of the desert locust - Schistocerca gregaria - have plagued agricultural societies since the beginnings of recorded history. How states have perceived and dealt with this threat has not only affected the livelihoods of generations of farmers and pastoralists; it has played an important part in the making and unmaking of states' legitimacy. This project brings together an historian, a forensic entomologist, an artist and an ecologist to examine the record of one of the most prominent international efforts ever made to counter this threat - the British Empire's Anti-Locust Research Centre (ALRC). Over the course of the twentieth-century, the ALRC drew on the expertise of entomologists, explorers, meteorologists, cartographers, filmmakers, colonial administrators, diplomats and military personnel in an unprecedented attempt to monitor, control and eradicate the desert locust across great swathes of the earth. At the height of its activities, during the Second World War in the Middle East, the ALRC came to the attention of some of the foremost scientists and statesmen of the day. Its successes were built on the collaboration of widely varying forms of expertise; its campaigns laid the foundations for systems of international control that still endure. But its record was not without frustrations, with compromises and tensions born of discrepancies between the differing disciplinary views of its participants, and of varying interpretations of their objective and the wider world.This project brings together history, ecology, entomology and art to examine the work of the Anti-Locust Research Centre, and the unique and hitherto unexplored archive it left behind. The ALRC was inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking; it requires an interdisciplinary approach to examine its record. Each Co-Investigator brings their own disciplinary expertise to bear upon key ALRC activities, from its navigation of imperial bureaucracies and wartime geopolitics to its specimen sampling and forecasting techniques, its use of visual media, and the multiple forms of environmental knowledge it promoted and inscribed. But throughout, the project also explores the process and nature of interdisciplinary work itself, examining how very different individuals and disciplines spoke to one another under the umbrella of the ALRC, and how we as Co-Investigators come to collaborate as we reconstruct its activities.This project is of interest to a wide number of communities both inside and outside of academia, including historians of the British Empire and the modern Middle East; entomologists and students of climate change, food security and bioterrorism possibilities; scholars and practitioners concerned with the dialogues and frictions between science and policy; and wider audiences interested in how 'migrants', 'pests' and systems of control are represented. Our exhibition and artist's book, which will explore the poetics and metaphors within the archive, also bring the possibility of our findings engaging with unanticipated audiences: those who encounter the gallery/exhibition space by chance and whose curiosity becomes piqued.