ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mediating Meteorology: Communicating Climate and Weather Knowledge from Antiquity to the Present

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel explores how meteorological and climate knowledge has been communicated, sensed, and trusted from antiquity to the present. Across the longue durée, humans have tried not only to predict the weather but also to transmit it and teach others how to perceive it, using a wide variety of instruments, texts, traditions, and formats. From stone calendars in ancient marketplaces to annotated 19th-century journals to 21st-century storm warnings, weather knowledge has always been shaped by the form in which it is conveyed.
The papers trace how people across historical contexts learned to observe, read, and interpret weather through textual, material, and embodied practices. The session includes weather texts and forecasting guides, as well as infrastructures such as the Tower of the Winds in Athens and storm warning systems modern-day the Netherlands. We aim to study how those various media interact with wider publics. Together, the papers ask: how does the medium shape the message and practice of meteorology? How do different forms of weather communication, be it textual, auditory, visual or tactile, alter what is known, felt, and trusted?
To further reflect on these questions, the session includes brief participatory moments: sensory or material demonstrations to help attendees reflect on their own experiences of weather communication, such as a home barometer, weather app, or local saying. In doing so, the panel invites new methodologies for understanding how climate knowledge is communicated.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Tamara Caulkins, Central Washington University

Individual Presentations

• Between Stars and Stones: Public Weather Reporting in Antiquity - Angelo Gargiulo, Ghent University

• Learning to Sense the Skies: Meteorological Practices, Communication, and the Co-Creation of Weather Knowledge (1700–1860) - Valentine Delrue, Ghent University

• Code red! Extreme weather and changing cultures of prediction, 1860-2010 - David Baneke, Utrecht University

Session Organizer

• Valentine Delrue, Ghent University