Place: Währingerstr. 29, SR 6
Time: 11:30-13:00 CET
All are welcome. Please sign up here [zoom link] to register for the meeting and receive the Zoom link and the pre-circulated reading. As background reading for the conversation, two texts will be circulated approximately one week before the colloquium.
This seminar considers two distinct yet interlinked approaches to understanding on- and off-Earth social relations through the lens of mineral flows. Glittering technologies as well as carefully-curated mineralogical museum displays obscure the complex social relationships, trajectories, and histories involved in wresting materials from the earth. As the texts themselves are the result of interdisciplinary collaboration, the authors hope to stimulate creative dialogue on sharing ideas and practices across disciplines, to invite collaborative conceptualization and theorization of the material practices surrounding the movements of minerals, and to hold space for discussing potential alternative futures.
Reading
Eleanor Armstrong and Camille-Mary Sharp, "Editorial: Mobilizing Museum Minerals," Museum & Society 22, no. 2–3 (December 9, 2024), [click here for direct access to the paper]
Julie Michelle Klinger, Eleanor Armstrong, "Earthly Entanglements with Outer Space: Introduction to the Theme Issue" forthcoming in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (this paper will be circulated to registered attendees)
Eleanor S. Armstrong is a Space Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK, where she leads the Constellations Lab. Her research is at the intersection of STS, cultural geography, education, and gender studies. She has held posts at the University of Delaware and Stockholm University, visiting positions at, among others, the University of Cambridge, Ingenium Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, New York University, and University of Vienna; and was awarded her PhD from University College London in 2020. Armstrong is Trustee of Pride in STEM; co-lead of the international biannual conference Space Science in Context; and co-developer of the design studio EXO-MOAN. Her research focuses 1) on queer feminist approaches to social studies of outer space, particularly the presentation of femininities, feminisms, and femmes in public discourses about outer space; and 2) on anti-colonial work in science and natural history museums.
Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger (she/her) is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware, and a member of the International Standards Organization Technical Advisory Group 298: Rare Earth Supply Chain Transparency and Traceability. Dr. Klinger and her research team are supported by the National Science Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Climate and Land Use Alliance to conduct in-depth field-based and global-scope research on competing uses for energy-transition metals, materials, and infrastructures. She has published numerous articles on rare earth elements, natural resource use, environmental politics, and outer space, including the award-winning 2018 book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes [2]. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.
