Visiting Scholar Fellowships

In September and October 2024, we welcomed Thomas Turnbull  from the Max Planck Instutute for the History of Science and Technology in Berlin. Among other activities, while here Thomas co-organised the HEPM II Workshop on Planetary Modelling,  and presented his co-authored forthcoming book.  Thomas studied history and geography at Kings College London and the University of Oxford. He completed a thesis in 2017, titled “From Paradox to Policy: The Problem of Energy Resource Conservation in Britain and America, 1865–1981,” which provided the first history of energy resource conservation as both a form of science and policy. Thomas has previously worked as a policy advisor for a London-based environmental think tank involved in implementing the European Eco-design Directive. He has also been part of a project at Cambridge University’s Museum of Anthropology, which was dedicated to preserving endangered languages via the creation of an audio database.

From September to December 2024, Iván González Iglesias is a visiting student at the Centre. He holds a Bachelor degree in Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He is committed to contribute for the planetary diverse affective transitions towards more adequate living patterns with the web of Life in an (unequally) ruined world. Thus, apart from investing time in learning from non-Western alternative possible worlds and their systemic critiques, he is trying to appreciate closer examples by working with some rural communities in Spain who suffered from great forest fires between 2021 and 2023, researching in participatory and intervening formats to learn from their complex affective regimes towards the territory and “translating” some valuable teachings through the writing of short tales.

At the Division he is engaged with designing different collective initiatives  related with the testing of the “arts of scholaring” in a damaged planet. For that purpose, he is contributing to design a reading discussion circle, a seminar and a workshop that brings the Division out of its “knowledge fortress” inviting speakers who come from different backgrounds (academic and more-than-academic) and whose aim is to build up stories of the “Academy of the Anthropocene”. 

Iván is looking forward to publishing an article reviewing his work at the Division and to digging in the existing Master programs around the Anthropocene. Moreover, he will be contributing to further collective actions related to the fight for Life in the communities he is being part of during his stay, like the swing dancers community in Stockholm.