Academic interests
My research looks at early efforts to bring science to bear on the question of future climates to advise politicians and publics.
Specifically, the peculiar environment at M.I.T. in the late 1960s and early ‘70s fascinates me. This was a culture that spawned various approaches to future change. Many of the protagonists had expertise that was new to the academy: they were “socio-technical engineers”, business school professors, and the computer-modeling pioneers of “systems dynamics”. They made their claims on the shifting epistemological terrain of an interdisciplinary field that was just coming together.
I am particularly interested in the proliferation of talk at the time about a science of “global problems”, which curiously resonates with the turn towards a politics of “issues” in science of technology studies.
I am also interested in how scientific claims about the future reckon with whatever collective human agencies that can, and do, shape earth-scale processes.
Background
My education includes a master’s in Modern Culture from the University of Copenhagen, and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University, majoring in human rights. I have also studied law and international relations. Queer theory, urban studies and documentary arts.
Before embarking on my PhD, I worked for several years as a staff writer, critic and commentator at the weekly Morgenbladet.
This broad experience has left me with a desire to work with knowledge in many ways; to be a scholar and not just a researcher. Luckily, the spirit of expanding the bounds of academic work is alive and well in the environmental humanities, but I am always open to encounters with new ways of thinking and doing.
Tags:
Futures,
Multiple temporalities,
History of Cold War Science,
STS,
Anthropocene,
Issues
Publications
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Jordheim, Helge; Op de Beke, Laura; Bjordal, Sine Halkjelsvik; Zuiderveen Borgesius, Leonoor; Brenna, Brita & Flatø, Emil Henrik
[Show all 9 contributors for this article]
(2022).
FOSSILIZATION, OR THE MATTER OF HISTORICAL FUTURES.
History and Theory.
ISSN 0018-2656.
61(1),
p. 4–26.
doi:
10.1111/hith.12250.
Show summary
In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” project, the Lifetimes Research Collective adds to the geological turn currently underway in historiography by presenting a theory of fossils and fossilizations as a way of rethinking the concept of “historical futures.” We proceed by addressing two pivotal speech acts in Western historiography, in the broad sense: the “fossil question,” which was first raised in the middle of the seventeenth century, about how a solid can end up inside another solid and the nineteenth-century Marxist slogan for the modern world, “all that is solid melts into air.” Transported into the early twenty-first century and faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene, both take on new meanings and perform new tasks. In this article, we experiment with different ways of thinking and writing fossils into more general questions of historiography and historical theory by investigating how they affect conceptualizations of historical time. Furthermore, we demonstrate how fossilizations indicate possible trajectories for new materialist speculations, distributing agency to various matters, physical and virtual, in the Earth's crust as well as in museums and video games. Finally, we ask how a theory of fossilization can be seen to decenter the human subject by exploring the processes of decomposition and solidification taking place in the human body. In this way, the arrangements of timescales and lifescales that have given rise to disciplines like history, geology, and biology are destabilized in favor of open-ended historical knowledge ventures that transgress temporal and epistemological borders.
View all works in Cristin
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Flatø, Emil
(2021).
Foreseeing Like a System: Enter the IPCC’s Scenario Matrix .
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Flatø, Emil
(2021).
Precious time, limited worlds: Toward a history of modeled climate futures.
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Flatø, Emil
(2021).
Is Time Space? The philosopher, the cybernaut, and futures in the Sixth Assessment Report.
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Flatø, Emil; Gruber, Christina; Hertz, Samuel; Brain, Tega & Domínguez Rangel, Natalia
(2020).
Zugzwang - The Compulsion to Find a Common Baseline in Sound.
Show summary
*German for "compulsion to move", is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they would prefer to pass and not move. (Oxford Dictionary)
Our multi-disciplinary work session will explore how a non-human centered approach towards the use of technology can help us to tune in with our companion species and environments. As Anna Tsing understands environments to be open-ended assemblages of non-humans, living and non-living, entangled in ways of life, sound can connect. Additionally depending on the point of observation sound can be received, propagated, and perceived.
The attempt to tune-in with our environments opens possibilities to critically discuss questions of listening, talking, and connecting with all our companions, living and non-living. Listening not only includes to care for each other, but foremost to eavesdrop on other species to prevent threats.The perception of sounds also poses paradoxical challenges: Even though sound is omnipresent, we have problems to understand. Miscommunication and distortion happen constantly. Can listening become once again one of the main assets to learn about our environment? The access to vast archives of data allows the interpretation of planetary sounds using machine learning. But will this prevent further misunderstandings? How can we actively teach these systems to avoid a too strong human-centered-perspective and allow to think as a connected network resonating on Earth.
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Flatø, Emil; Zuiderveen Borgesius, Leonoor Elisabeth; Jacobsen, Stine Alling & Bastian, Michelle
(2020).
Is Time That Hard to Grasp? - Trailer for the stream Approaching Time-Things.
Show summary
The stream “Approaching Time-Things”, which participates at STREAMS 2021, is dedicated to time that matters, times that take material form, that you can touch; an inquiry into time as an observable phenomenon. In other words, we want to challenge the truism that time is impossible to grasp or represent.
Kicking off a trailer in July, the organizers will host a virtual conversation with the philosopher Michelle Bastian, who has spent more than a decade blazing new trails in critical time studies and more-than-human temporalities. In Bastian’s thought, time appears in surprising places. Time-keeping, she has argued, may be more ethical with reference to the fate of leatherback turtles on a warming planet, than in the contemporary, international time regime measuring seconds through shifts in the cesium atom. Currently working on the temporal lessons of phenology – “nature’s calendar,” or the study of recurring nonhuman events and their interactions with climate – Bastian is adamant that time is not intangible at all.
Is time that hard to grasp? Tune in on August 5th, 14.00–15.00 CET as we reflect on this critical issue. We will also be considering why time has been so abstracted throughout modern Western history, and what role this abstraction plays in the grand temporal imaginaries of modernity. Finally, what kind of colonial notions of seasonality makes some Australians of European descent sport fake Christmas spruces in mid-summer?
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Flatø, Emil Henrik
(2020).
Temporalizing the Issue – Lessons about time and science from 1970s climate futures
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Flatø, Emil
(2019).
Journalism, History and Environmental Time(s) - Lessons from ”Atchafalaya”
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Flatø, Emil
(2018).
Jeg hater internett.
Fanfare.
ISSN 9780996421805.
View all works in Cristin
Published May 6, 2019 3:28 PM
- Last modified Jan. 22, 2020 3:48 PM
