31 January 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Felipe Vilo Muñoz (UT)

“Under the Desert Spell”: The Atacama Desert Exploration Communities in Chile, 1820–1880

In this dissertation chapter, I examine how explorers’ knowledge production reshaped the Chilean government’s relationship with the Atacama Desert from 1820 to 1880. I argue that explorers such as Claude Gay (1800–1873), Ignacy Domeyko (1802–1889), Rudolph Philippi (1808–1904), Pedro Jose Amadeo Pissis (1812–1889), and Francisco Vidal Gormaz (1837–1907), developed a robust communication network with the Chilean government making the Atacama part of its national construction. Explorers led the Natural History Museum (1830) and the University of Chile (1842), institutions that produced most of the Atacama expedition reports, travelogues, periodicals, and maps to support the exploitation of its untapped resources such as guano, silver, copper, and nitrate. Nevertheless, the exploration was not a peaceful enterprise. It escalated into a conflict with the neighboring countries of Bolivia and Peru. The War of the Pacific (1879–1883), the last major conflict in South America, mobilized the Chilean government to occupy and annex the desert. The consequences of this war have shaped the Atacama to this day. Recent discoveries have demonstrated that the Atacama holds the world’s largest proven reserves of lithium, a promising commodity for the prospective energy revolution, which aim to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. The steady global influence of the Atacama reminds us of how the driest desert on Earth has contributed to the accelerating pace of global connectivity over the past two hundred years.

________________

Felipe Vilo Muñoz is a PhD candidate in the UT History Department and a 2024–2025 Linda Hall Library Fellow. His research concerns transnational knowledge production from the nineteenth-century exploration of the Atacama Desert.

22 November 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Cécile Stehrenberger (Univ. of Wuppertal)

“Doing Science in the Eye of the Storm: Social Science Disaster Research, 1949-1994”

During the Cold War, several US social science “disaster research groups” conducted hundreds of fields studies after floods, earthquakes, and factory explosions. My presentation explores their research goals, their scientific practices, and their findings, analyzing transformations and continuities in the knowledge production process. I will elaborate on how the “anchoring practice” of disaster research, the conduct of rapid response fields studies in post-disaster zones, was connected to a specific understanding of disasters as concentrated events and as natural “laboratories” for developing general theories of human behavior. Moreover, I will show how disaster research was based on practices of othering, and demonstrate how a combination of socio-structural and cultural factors prevented disaster research, during the period I study, from becoming “critical” disaster studies.

___________________

Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger is an assistant professor for Historical Comparative Studies of Science and Technology at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. After receiving her PhD from the University of Zurich, she has taught at the Universities of Braunschweig and Erfurt, and was a visiting scholar at the IAS in Princeton, the CSDS in Delhi, and the CALAS Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on the history of disaster science, the entangled history of toxic waste, as well as on the memory of slow disasters.