Histories of Weathering and Weathering in History

Amid two days of constantly changing winter weather in Stavanger, established and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines gathered at the Greenhouse Center to explore how people have understood and experienced climate and weather across centuries, languages and media. Co-organised by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow Animesh Chatterjee and the Greenhouse’s Research Events Coordinator Melina Antonia Buns, the workshop sought to peer through multi- and inter-disciplinary boundaries to examine the sociological and anthropological concept of “weathering” through diverse research fields, methodologies, and styles of historical inquiry.

The workshop was designed to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue through participant-led sessions, beginning with visual lightning talks, where participants introduced themselves and their research interests using a single image or text in five-minute presentations.

Following this, the first group session divided participants into four themed groups: “Spaces and places of feeling and measuring”; “Living and understanding rain”; “Atmospheric thinking through dust, water and livestock”; and “Everyday weather(ing) and its interpretations.” These themes-based discussions of participants’ draft papers produced diverse associations and threads that highlighted the importance of studying not just temporal and spatial scales, but also geographies and flows. Experiences of weather extended beyond scientific knowledge-making and literary production but consisted of creating and negotiating with socially constructed and historically specific boundaries — between spaces, material and human bodies — and climates — environmental, political, cultural — that constituted everyday life.

The second day opened with group sessions based on the previous day’s discussions. Each group explored a theme paired with a methodological challenge:

• Bodies: How can historians study weathering through human and non-human bodies? | Sources: What kinds of historical or archival sources can be used to uncover and write such histories?
• Knowledge: How was knowledge of weather and climate created and/or erased, and how was such knowledge crucial to processes of weathering? | Scale: How can historians reconcile the vastly different temporal and spatial scales of natural phenomena and human lives?
• Values: How were processes of weathering shaped by and embedded in the creation and maintenance of racial, class and social thinking and practices? | Methodologies: What methodological and analytical shifts can we introduce to paint a clearer picture of the place of weather, seasons and climate in cultural and political expressions, everyday lives and material cultures?

Participants then contextualised and collected their ideas with specific historiographical interventions on archives and other sites and spaces of observing, experiencing, and imagining climate and weather.

The final session was devoted to exploring alternatives to traditional academic outputs like edited collections or special issues, emphasising the need for innovative ways to present and communicate the findings and outcomes of the workshop. Dr Clare Hickman (Newcastle University), who moderated the session, drew on the now finished “In All Our Footsteps” project to help participants consider their target audiences, the purposes they intend their outputs to serve, and what the outputs will allow them to achieve. Given the workshop’s focus on how preconceptions, beliefs, values, and emotions shape narratives, the group concluded that historicising weathering requires multi- and inter-disciplinary storytelling.

The workshop provided useful insights into the importance of affect and material cultures in historical research, revealing culturally and spatially specific ways of understanding not just what weather's effects were, but also how people felt and lived. It also raised important questions about our past, present and future relationships with weather and climate, and how historical writing can be mobilised to enrich public engagement with climate change.

The workshop was funded by EU Horizon Grant No.101061421 and supported by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at UiS, and the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC).