Atmospheric Matters

Histories of the atmospheric sciences have explored the cultural imaginations, scientific networks, political institutions, and material objects through which knowledges of meteorology and climatology have been produced, circulated and consumed (e.g. Anderson, 2005; 2018; Baker, 2017; Coen, 2018; Edwards, 2010; Fleming, 2016). These have increasingly acknowledged the complex role of instruments and operators, the materialities in the production of data, and the (unstable) networks that had to be continually re-made for scientific and political goals. More specifically, these include the design, organisation and collation of log books, the affordances of laboratory equipment and travelling instruments, the capacities of computers, the sheer weight of paper in data archives, and the socio-material infrastructure of observation networks or analytical work. In this panel, we take the discussions of materiality further, drawing on scholarship that has placed the material at the centre of historiography, not as a determining force, but as a push to understand materialities within socio-material ‘assemblages’, ‘networks’, or as coproduced between human and non-human actors (e.g. Barry, 2013; Daston, 2000; Turkle, 2007). These socio-materialities rarely worked in a singular direction - the material did not merely constrain or generate what was possible. Indeed, scientists frequently extended, altered or challenged the ‘limits’ and internal functions of these technologies and materials. Likewise, technologies were frequently used for multiple concurrent purposes, and different components created different possibilities and constraints. Papers in this panel consider in what ways and with what effects socio-materialities shaped, opened up, and/or constrained scientific work in the atmospheric sciences.