William J. Perry Fellow in International Security, Paul N. Edwards, joins STS
By Clifton B. Parker
Edwards: knowledge and information infrastructures
Edwards, a professor in University of Michigan’s School of Information and history department, studies the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science.
“I’m interested in how we know what we know about climate change,” Edwards said in an interview.
After this spring’s U.S. retreat from the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, Edwards has seen heightened interest in how knowledge about climate change is created, conveyed, disputed, and used. He is keenly intrigued by the “historical trajectory of knowledge infrastructures,” and how they unfold in the Anthropocene era.
He also plans to work on a nuclear security project with CISAC’s William J. Perry and Scott Sagan on the legality of nuclear war. Modern climate models show that the climatic effects (“nuclear winter”) of even a relatively small nuclear war could be severe enough to affect noncombatant nations worldwide, he noted.
“So, we are asking, is it even legal to start a nuclear war?” he said.
In the year ahead, Edwards will be co-teaching a course on “averting near-term human extinction” and undertaking another on “techno-metabolism.” The latter concerns how human technological systems, much like biological organisms, consume energy and materials and excrete waste — but unlike ecosystems, obtain most energy from unrenewable fossil sources and fail to recycle wastes.
At Michigan, he served as the director of the university’s Science, Technology & Society Program. His award-winning books include A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010) and The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996).
Edwards also previously taught at Stanford, from 1992 to 1998. He earned a doctorate in the history of consciousness at UC Santa Cruz (1988) and a bachelor’s degree in language and mind at Wesleyan University (1980).
Hecht and Edwards met in 1992 while co-teaching a course in Stanford’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. They have taught together many times since then, most notably inaugurating a course on nuclear and climate catastrophes at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). They have also co-authored several essays, including an article on the technopolitics of apartheid and its opponents, which appeared in the leading Journal of Southern African Studies.