Principal Investigator
Sabine Höhler is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she serves as Head of Department of Philosophy and History. She holds a MSc degree in physics and a PhD in history of science and technology. Her research addresses the intersections of technoscience and the history of the earth sciences in a global historical perspective, from atmospheric physics to physical oceanography and space ecology. Her recent work addresses the history of sustainability studies at the turn to the twenty-first century with case studies on ecological accounting systems, biodiversity management, stress ecology, resilience, remote sensing, and terraforming. Her publications include the monograph Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990 (Pickering & Chatto 2015, paperback edition Routledge 2016) on the spaceship as a key metaphor in the late twentieth-century debate over the world’s resources and the future of humankind and the co-edited theme issue “Writing History in the Anthropocene”, published 2020 in Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft/Journal for Historical Social Sciences.
Johan Gärdebo is a historian of science, technology and environment at Uppsala University. He has researched climate transition policies, environmental diplomacy, and technoscientific aid. His monograph dissertation Environing Technology (2019) analysed the role Swedish satellite remote sensing expert’s played in articulating political imperatives to monitor and manage a global environment during the late twentieth century. As part of the Mediated Planet project, Gärdebo studies the history of standardising, automating, and digitising environmental data.
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. In her work she has explored among other things digital memories, death online, and lived experiences of automation. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, forthcoming 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’s existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is the PI of the WASP-HS project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds.” Find out more here.
In a nutshell, I am grappling with how to render graspable the novel modes of relation between human-beings, the environment, and digital technologies that emerge in the scientific practice of environmental scientists that make use of artificial intelligence. I have been focusing particularly on Earth Observation and remote sensing which makes use of machine learning. These domains take as their starting point vast data flows and great computational infrastructures. The aim of my project is three-fold. Firstly, to delineate the techniques of data collecting and processing that are implicated in doing environmental AI. Secondly, to assess the epistemic consequences of these techniques. And thirdly, to provide a genealogy and thorough historical contextualization of the circumstances which enabled the environment to become mediated by machine learning algorithms. Sitting at the crossroads between the themes of science, technology, and the environment, my approach draws from several fields and theoretical lineages, from critical media theory, science and technology studies, post-humanism, anthropology, environmental history, history of knowledge, and critical AI studies.
Susanna Lidström is a researcher in environmental humanities at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. With a background in literary studies, her research focuses on environmental narratives and their form, function and development over time. She is especially interested in narrative representations of the ocean. She mostly studies non-fiction, including scientific concepts, policy frameworks, and popular discourses. She is a visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where she is currently based. Recent publications include “The metaphor of “ocean health” is problematic; “the ocean we want” is a better term” (with Tirza Meyer and Jesse Peterson, Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022), “Ocean literacy and marine environmental narratives: interpretations of sustainability in the deep sea” (Resilience, forthcoming) and “Ocean environing media: datafication and governance of the deep sea” (with Johan Gärdebo and Adam Wickberg, in Environing Media, ed. Gärdebo and Wickström, forthcoming).
Tirza Meyer is a contemporary historian and postdoctoral researcher in the history of media and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a specific focus on the history of ocean governance and environment. Her current project Humanoid Oceans is about the history of underwater technology and the ocean environment. Her broader research interests are the Blue Humanities, environmental history, the history of the Law of the Sea, ocean governance concepts, science and technology and human-ocean relations. She is affiliated with the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and a member of the Collaboratory Media Seas of the High North Atlantic. Recent publications include: Meyer, T. (21 Apr. 2022). Elisabeth Mann Borgese and the Law of the Sea. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Nijhoff; S. Lidström, T. Meyer, J. Petersen (2022): “The metaphor of ocean “health” is problematic : “the ocean we want” is a better term,” Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022; Meyer, T. (2019). ” The Deep Sea Floor as a Battleground for Justice?”. In The Future of Ocean Governance and Capacity Development. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Nijhoff.
Sverker Sörlin is a professor in the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and a co-founder of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. He also serves as a policy analyst and advisor. Current research interests include the science politics of climate change, the formation of environmental expertise, and the history of global environmental governance. He is the co-author, with Libby Robin and Paul Warde, of The Environment — a History of the Idea (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), and, with Klaus Dodds, of Ice Humanities: Living, Thinking and Working in a Melting World (Manchester University Press, 2022).
Adam Wickberg is a researcher in the history of media and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He received his PhD in 2016 from Stockholm University and the Research School in Cultural History. He is currently (2021-2023) a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, dept 1, where he is also a member of the working group Anthropocene Formations. His research addresses media and environment in a broad manner, from historical contexts to current developments of new digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence in relation to sustainability. He is the co-editor of the collection Environing Media (Routledge, 2022), a book that probes the new theoretical concept of environing media as an analytical tool that can account for how media produce environmental epistemologies in different historical times. His work appears in various journals including Critical Inquiry, Global Environmental Politics, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Resilience, History & Technology and Media Theory.
Nina Wormbs is Professor in History of Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She has studied media history and digitalisation and recently studied climate change from the view-point of environmental humanities, for example the normativity of scientific assessments and the temporal dimensions of climate change models. Publications include Wormbs & Wolrath Söderberg (2021), “Knowledge, Fear, and Conscience: Reasons to Stop Flying Because of Climate Change”, Urban Planning; Wormbs (2019), “Technology Dependent Commons”, in Routledge Handbook of the study of the commons; Wormbs (2018), ”Sublime Satellite Imagery as Environing Technology”, Azimuth; and Wormbs (ed.), Competing Arctic Futures (Palgrave 2018). She communicates research through the daily press and public service radio and she collaborates with society as a member of steering committees and commissions. In 2013-14 she was the public inquirer on digitalisation of radio for the Ministry of Culture.