Atmospheric Archives: Gender and Climate Knowledge in Colonial Tasmania. Mercer, H. Environment and History, 27:193–210, 2021.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
There is a rich cache of letters detailing the production of climate knowledge at Tasmania's Hobart Observatory in the early nineteenth century. By contrast, a mere handful of sentences survive in the written record to describe the production of climate knowledge outside the Hobart Observatory, in Tasmania's north-east. In this paper, I confront the question of what to do with these unbalanced archival remains. I draw on the work of social and cultural historians as well as historians of colonialism and science to advocate a three-pronged methodology for approaching the problem of the unbalanced atmospheric archives. The application of this methodology, I show, reveals the way gender relations shaped the way atmospheric knowledge was both produced and used by historical actors in colonial Tasmania.
@article{mercer_atmospheric_2021,
	title = {Atmospheric {Archives}: {Gender} and {Climate} {Knowledge} in {Colonial} {Tasmania}},
	volume = {27},
	shorttitle = {Atmospheric {Archives}},
	doi = {10.3197/096734021X16076828553421},
	abstract = {There is a rich cache of letters detailing the production of climate knowledge at Tasmania's Hobart Observatory in the early nineteenth century. By contrast, a mere handful of sentences survive in the written record to describe the production of climate knowledge outside the Hobart
Observatory, in Tasmania's north-east. In this paper, I confront the question of what to do with these unbalanced archival remains. I draw on the work of social and cultural historians as well as historians of colonialism and science to advocate a three-pronged methodology for approaching
the problem of the unbalanced atmospheric archives. The application of this methodology, I show, reveals the way gender relations shaped the way atmospheric knowledge was both produced and used by historical actors in colonial Tasmania.},
	journal = {Environment and History},
	author = {Mercer, Harriet},
	year = {2021},
	keywords = {Aboriginal, Australia, Indigenous Australians, Tasmania, climate, gender, historical climatology, knowledge, women},
	pages = {193--210},
}

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