Learning to Disagree Well

In her first Annual Address to Senate House since her inauguration in July as Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice highlighted the imperative for university students to learn to “disagree well” on difficult subjects.  To facilitate this learning, Prentice intends to moderate a series of “dialogues” at Cambridge, in which experts challenge each other on the pressing […]

Review: “Inside the World of Climate Change Sceptics”

Read here my review, to appear in Public Understanding of Science, of Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra’s new book. As I conclude my review … “[T]he art of politics is not to get everyone to agree with you, but rather to find allies with whom you can find joint ways forward, even if sometimes compromised. […]

The Most Important Book of 2023

Those readers who followed my blog posts during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 will know I became increasingly frustrated and bewildered, then angry, and finally depressed, about the institutionalized responses to the COVID pandemic, which in my...

Meeting Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood died on the 29 December 2022.  A larger than life character, I once had the opportunity to meet her – at her suggestion – to discuss her thoughts about climate change and a campaigning TV series, to...

‘Classics in human geography’: The science and politics of climate change

In 2001, David Demeritt published an article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers titled, ‘The construction of global warming and the politics of science‘. It has been cited nearly 1000 times (Google Scholar). Now, more than two decades later, I and Rebecca Lave offer short retrospectives on the significance of Demeritt’s article […]