Remote sensing: ice, instruments, imagination

• Lilian Kroth (Doctoral researcher, French Department)
• Amelia Urry (Doctoral researcher, History and Philosophy of Science)

Co-Organisers:

• Charlotte Connelly (Curator, Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge)
• Dehlia Hannah (Fellow, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen)

Lilian Kroth currently works on her PhD project on the concepts of limits, boundaries and borders in the work of Michel Serres at the French Department, University of Cambridge, and is associated to the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. She is interested in Serres’s understanding of the North-West-Passage in its crucial role for his understanding of transdisciplinarity, epistemology, orientation is space and time, and the significance for climate in regard to critique of Western metaphysics. Lilian has a background in Philosophy (BA, MA, University of Vienna) and Drawing (University of Fine Arts, Vienna). She organized the AHRC-reading group and workshop ‘Translating Entropy’ (2021-2022), led two sessions on ‘Drawing with the work of Michel Serres’ (Tactics and Practice Seminar, Cambridge), and contributed to various exhibitions (e.g. Plan D, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, 2020, WHISK with Stefanie Hintersteiner, 2019; BAU2–6, WE COULD ALSO BE SILENT with Elisabeth Wildling and Veronika Mayer, 2018).

Amelia Urry is a doctoral researcher and Gates Cambridge Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, where she studies conceptions of scientific uncertainty in the history of climate science through a study of historical attempts to map, measure, and model Antarctica. Her research addresses the forms of knowledge that emerge from remote sensing and fieldwork, as well as the narratives that accompany these practices, both within scientific communities and beyond them. Her background is in literature and journalism; she studied at Yale with the poet Louise Glück, and has been the recipient of writing awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Theron Rockwell fund, and the Norman Mailer Foundation. As a journalist, she was recognized by the Society of Environmental Journalists for her reporting on technology and science, and received fellowships from the Heinreich Böll Stiftung, the Earth Journalism Network, the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, and the International Women’s Media Foundation, among others.