In order to fend off any suspicion that my interest in the urban squirrel has blinded me to the darker, less cuddly side of urban life — though perhaps at risk of raising other concerns — I share this photo acquired last weekend during a sunset walk in my new neighborhood, the Körnerkiez in Neukölln, Berlin.
Tag: animals
floating baselines and affective ecologies
I’m looking forward to the upcoming meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) in Copenhagen on Oct. 18-20, where I’ll be participating in two panels. Continue reading “floating baselines and affective ecologies”
the art of surveillance
In the summer of 2008 I was lucky enough to be able to collaborate on an artistic experiment on camouflage and surveillance on one of the islands in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. It’s hard to believe that was almost four years ago. On the principle that late is better than never, I thought I’d attempt to describe what we did and why it turned out to be such an exciting experience/experiment.
The Camoufleurs project was initially dreamed up by historian of science Hanna Rose Shell and architect Dan Hisel, who successfully proposed it to the coordinators of the Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, then in its second year. At the time, Hanna was in the process of writing what would turn out to be a fascinating book about the history of camouflage. Dan had also been studying the history of camouflage and teaching his students about its relevance to architecture. Continue reading “the art of surveillance”
‘i can but offer thee a verse…’
For the moment, I offer the following literary treasure without much comment, except to say that it and its theme have been preoccupying me lately to what is probably an unhealthy extent.
“The Pensioner in Gray” was first published in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas in 1908 (Vol. 36, No. 1, Nov. 1908, p. 11) and later reprinted in Our Dumb Animals (Vol. 45, No. 9, Feb. 1913, p. 142), the magazine of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “Dumb” here meaning voiceless, of course. Its author was Marian Longfellow, cousin of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Continue reading “‘i can but offer thee a verse…’”
squirrels at the rachel carson center
For a little more than a year now, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich has been serving as an international hub for environmental history under the directorship of Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler. On December 15th, I’ll be speaking in the RCC’s lunchtime colloquium on a topic that has fascinated me for a while but has only just begun to shape up into an argument about the history of human-animal relations: the adaptation of the North American eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) to the urban environment. See below for the RCC’s full lunchtime colloquium schedule for December. Continue reading “squirrels at the rachel carson center”
From Wild Lives to Wildlife and Back
From Wild Lives to Wildlife and Back, Environmental History 16, no. 3 (2011): 418-422. (pdf)
Animal Writes: Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace
Animal Writes: Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace, in Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kalof and Georgina Montgomery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011): 3-16. (pdf)