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

自有记载的历史开始以来，沙漠蝗虫的暴发就一直困扰着农业社会。各州如何看待和处理这一威胁，不仅影响了几代农民和牧民的生计，而且对国家合法性的确立和瓦解起到了重要作用。这个项目汇集了一位历史学家、一位法医昆虫学家、一位艺术家和一位生态学家，以研究有史以来最著名的国际努力之一的记录-大英帝国反蝗虫研究中心(ALRC)。在二十世纪的整个过程中，ALRC利用昆虫学家、探险家、气象学家、制图师、电影制作人、殖民行政人员、外交官和军事人员的专业知识，进行了前所未有的尝试，以监测、控制和根除地球大片地区的沙漠蝗虫。在中东第二次世界大战期间，在其活动的顶峰时期，ALRC引起了当时一些最重要的科学家和政治家的注意。它的成功建立在各种形式的专业知识协作的基础上；它的运动为至今仍有效的国际控制制度奠定了基础。但它的记录并不是没有挫折的，妥协和紧张源于参与者不同的学科观点之间的差异，以及对他们的目标和更广阔世界的不同解释。这个项目将历史、生态学、昆虫学和艺术结合在一起，审查反蝗虫研究中心的工作，以及它留下的独特和迄今未被探索的档案。ALRC本质上是一项跨学科的工作；它需要一种跨学科的方法来审查其记录。每个联合调查员都将自己的学科专业知识应用于ALRC的关键活动，从其对帝国官僚机构和战时地缘政治的导航，到其标本采样和预测技术，其对视觉媒体的使用，以及其宣传和记录的多种形式的环境知识。但在整个过程中，该项目也探索了跨学科工作本身的过程和性质，研究了在ALRC的保护伞下，非常不同的个人和学科是如何相互交谈的，以及我们作为联合调查者如何在重建其活动时进行合作。这个项目引起了学术界内外的广泛社区的兴趣，包括大英帝国和现代中东的历史学家；昆虫学家和气候变化、食品安全和生物恐怖主义可能性的学生；关注科学和政策之间对话和摩擦的学者和实践者；以及更广泛的受众，他们对如何表现“移民”、“害虫”和控制系统感兴趣。我们的展览和艺术家的书，将探索档案中的诗学和隐喻，也带来了我们的发现与意想不到的观众接触的可能性：那些偶然遇到画廊/展览空间的人，他们的好奇心被激怒了。

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.