This workshop, organized as the inaugural initiative of the Baselining Nature working group within The Art of Judgement, aims at fostering a multidisciplinary analysis of the role of baselines in a variety of fields, ranging from policy to academia, and including nature conservation, toxic waste, sustainable development, and sea level rise.

One of the workshop’s purposes is to suggest alternative pathways for conceptualizing and utilizing baselines, putting in the forefront the necessity to put all different kinds of existing baseline discourses in science and policy into their broader social, cultural, and material context. The working group that will crystallize around this workshop aims thus at reframing the epistemological problem of shifting baselines as one of cultural representation and imagination, radical historicity, connection of power and knowledge, and the distributed agency of a variety of human, non-human, and post-human actors operating at multiple geographic and temporal scales. Finally, instead of merely asking which temporal framework best serves as a starting point for measuring environmental change, the workshop plans to explore how and in which terms global and cosmopolitan processes of standardization of environmental knowledge prevailed over vernacular, regional, or national ways of seeing, measuring, and stewarding ecosystems.

Presenters

• Thomas Andrews (University of Colorado)
• Mohamed Rafi Arefin & Travis De Wolfe (UW Madison)
• Javiera Barandarian (UC Santa Barbara)
• Irus Braverman (SUNY Buffalo)
• Melissa Charenko (UW Madison)
• Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (SUNY New Paltz)
• Josh Grace (University of South Carolina)
• Lizzy Hare (Scripps College)
• Shana Hirsch (University of Idaho)
• Abby Kinchy (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
• Jessica Lehman (UW Madison)
• Ingmar Lippert (Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin)
• Maxime Polleri (York University)
• Katherine Sammler (CSU Maritime Academy)

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