The first AGM of the CIO took place on Tuesday 23rd March 2021.
Following the meeting Dr Alexander Hall from the University of Brimingham gave the guest lecture entitled:
Who speaks for the flood? Exploring changing expectations in response to flooding and extreme weather in the UK
and a video of the lecture can be found here.
The papers for the meeting can be found here:
Merged accounts for the UA and the CIO
In this talk, historian Dr Alexander Hall explored how across the twentieth-century, institutional, community and individual responses to flooding and other extreme weather events have changed. Using a range of different historical records, he demonstrated how we can build a more in-depth picture of such fleeting, but often devastating disasters. By juxtaposing and incorporating views from national, regional, and scientific records, along with personal accounts, he showed how different historical events can look when viewed from a range of perspectives.
Dr Alexander Hall is a historian of science and an environmental historian who researches the history of science in popular media; exploring how scientists have gained positions of expertise in society, used the media to communicate complex theories to the public, and how non-scientific understandings of the natural environment have interacted with scientific knowledge. He is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham working on the project ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’, the co-project lead for the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society, President of the International Commission for the History of Meteorology, and the History of Science Section Recorder for the British Science Association.
He has published works on a wide range of subjects from the history of flooding in the UK to the relationship between science and religion as depicted on broadcast media, and is currently working on a book titled, The story of evolution on British television and radio: Transmissions & Transmutations, which is under contract with Palgrave.
