Etienne Benson
Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
4pm, January 17th, 2019
6265 Bunche (History Department Reading Room)
Over the past hundred years there have been dramatic changes in the way scientists study the long-range movements of animals, from the large-scale bird-banding initiatives of the early twentieth century to today’s deployment of satellite-linked tracking devices and networks of citizen scientists, each capable of generating extraordinary quantities of data. Drawing on scholarship on the history of the field sciences, data-intensive science, and biopolitics, this talk will explore how practices of ecological research and conservation are shifting as data become increasingly abundant and the relationship between populations and territories becomes increasingly unstable.
Sponsored by the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics and the UCLA Department of History.