Guest Lecture "An Unrepresentable Other? Modelling Climate through Story-Telling"

Dr. Solveig Nitzke (University Dresden)

Climate is a problem of knowledge. Different from weather, it cannot be directly experienced. Access to climate as knowledge and experience has become all the more complicated the more knowledge about the complex entanglements of local weather and global climate has been produced. Modern climate is a protean, global and hyper-complex phenomenon whose representation is necessarily mediated and thus challenges notions of understandability and representability of nature as a whole. This is the starting point of any investigation into climate from a cultural studies perspective. The talk aims at showing how climate’s inherent need for modelling (re-)activates specific narrative modes and how these are entangled with any attempt – scientific, political, experiential – to connect climate and culture.