Scientising the ‘environment’: The School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, 1967-1990.

Honeybun-Arnolda, Elliot (2022) Scientising the ‘environment’: The School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, 1967-1990. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

There is a major gap in science studies concerning how the ‘environment’ came to be known and governed through practices of science in the post-war United Kingdom. Yet the ‘sciences’ of the environment are the predominant means by which we have come to know challenges of environmental change. This thesis engages with history and geography of science, environmental history, and STS literature to question how the ‘environment’ became an object of thought for a new university, how new knowledge emerged as both a product of co-production and as a tool of co-production. The ‘environmental sciences’ emerged in response to the changing post-war world, continuing to respond and change with the world around them. I demonstrate this through four linked case-studies concerning the emergence and development of ENV between the 1960s and 1990s. I make three key contributions: I shed light on how different sciences and practices of interdisciplinarity emerged as constitutive of the ‘environmental sciences’ and how these diversities led to different forms of knowledge about different kinds of environmental change. Numerous cultures of ‘environmental’ knowledge bloomed in the ENV space but not necessarily in a unified or interdisciplinary way. I proffer an ‘ecology of co-production sensibility that demonstrates new conceptual links to offer a novel approach for research in science studies. I also illuminate how ENV as a historical space of ‘co-production’ responded to and shaped the world around it in politically and epistemically important ways. I conclude with a critical examination of the future direction in which ENV and the ‘environmental sciences’ might head in the ‘Anthropocene’.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	18 Jan 2023 11:14
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 11:14
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90627
DOI:

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