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Full-Text Articles in Physical and Environmental Geography
Heat And Colonial Weather Science In The Straits Settlements C. 1820-1900, Fiona Williamson
Heat And Colonial Weather Science In The Straits Settlements C. 1820-1900, Fiona Williamson
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
Historical explorations of tropical heat in a colonial context have largely focussed on two interconnected spheres: colonial perceptions of place and body or, the implications of heat on different bodies in medical thought and practice. This paper seeks to move the discussion towards a history of colonial scientific thought about heat as component of weather and of escalating nature-induced hazards, studied in the observatory or meteorological department. A central theme is to think about heat in its relationship to nascent meso-scale atmospheric knowledge, meteorological theory and, as a by-product of urbanisation and land-use change. In so doing, it conceptualises the …
Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney
Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Popular representations of disasters tend to focus upon dramatic moments of chaos. They envision panicked communities desperately scrambling for safety as earthquakes reduce cities to rubble or lava turns villages to ashes. Yet disasters actually unfold on numerous temporal scales. Media reports tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated on the shallow causal timescale of a meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption. Social scientists, by contrast, have often sought to emphasise the processual nature of disasters—embedding causality in the deeper timescale of a community, in which risk and vulnerability build over months or years.2 Environmental historians elongate causality even further, …