Inaugural conference course 2023-2024

L'Institut d'Història de la Ciència  (iHC) de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) invites you to the inaugural conference of the 2023-2024 academic year, which will take place on October 5th at 12:00 PM in the room Seminari of the iHC.

The conference will be delivered by Professor Marco Armiero, ICREA, Institute of the History of Science, and it is titled:“Science, power, and narrative justice: The Vajont Dam Disaster (Italy, 1963)”.

On October 9, 1963, two thousand people died as they were engulfed by the wave of water and mud unleashed by a gigantic landslide that plunged into the Vajont basin. In 2008, UNESCO included it among the five most serious anthropogenic environmental disasters, describing it as "a classic example of what happens when engineers and geologists prove incapable of grasping the nature of the problem they are trying to address." Indeed, the Vajont dam is still there, only slightly affected by the landslide, demonstrating that high engineering alone is not enough to prevent disaster; in fact, it was not the dam that collapsed but the mountain, as many had feared.

Building upon my recently published book, La Tragedia del Vajont. Ecologia politica di un disastro (Einaudi 2023), I will employ that case study to unpack the intertwining of science, politics, and memories in the making of socioecological relationships.

Marco Armiero is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. For ten years, he directed the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He was a postdoc and visiting scholar at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. He was a Marie Curie fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. From 2019 to 2023, he served as the President of the European Society for Environmental History. He has worked on fascism and nature, migrations and the environment, and environmental justice. He is the editor-in-chief of "Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities" (Nebraska UP, formerly Resilience). Among his most relevant publications are "La tragedia del Vajont" (Einaudi, 2023); "Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dumps" (Cambridge UP, 2021, translated into Spanish by Catarata in 2023, and also translated or in the process of being translated into Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, French, and Bosniac); "Mussolini’s Nature" with R. Biasillo and W. Graf von Hardenberg (MITP, 2022); and "Environmental History of Modern Migrations" with R. Tucker (Routledge, 2017).