Cycles of Circulation at the 18th Swiss Geoscience Meeting in Zurich

Left image: Lester Beall posters promoting the Rural Electrification Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture (1930). Right images: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office’s posters promoting the Green New Deal (2019).

This year’s 18th Swiss Geoscience Meeting to be held on Friday, 6 November and Saturday, 7 November, 2020. Hosted by the Department of Earth Sciences of the ETH Zurich and the Platform Geosciences of the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT), the sessions feature a series of 28 scientific symposia that cover the diverse spectrum of current research in geosciences, encompassing the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the biosphere, the atmosphere and the anthroposphere. Invited keynote lectures will be held on this year’s Plenary Session theme: “Shaping Earth: From Planet Accretion To Microbes”.
Cycles of Circulation (Jamie Allen, Dr. Sria Chatterjee, Karolina Sobecka, Solveig Suess) will present a critical history and contemporary analysis of geosciences relevant communications at the event, outlining how such renderings present information as both scientific, public and therefore political. Showing examples of histories, stories and impacts of how both scientific and public campaign aesthetics are mobilised in contexts of scientific publication, conferences, public events and debate, we aim to articulate discussion as to the ways in which communications can of this kind can help to make explicit the goals and intentions of the geosciences vis a vis urgent topics like anthropogenic climate change, environmental racism, ecological justice, extractive industries. As an interdisciplinary group we hope to encourage discussion, questions, inconsistencies and unquestioned assumptions at the intersections of exchange within interdisciplinary communities, and with publics.