Zoom-Link: univienna.zoom.us/j/63643107815;
Meeting-ID: 636 4310 7815 | Kenncode: 603862
Most research in biogeography today is based on a 146-year-old model which divides the world into six regions, originally proposed by lawyer and zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater on the basis of the global distribution of birds. These regions became the foundation for research into the geographic distribution of living organisms, which in turn formed a component in one of the most contested phenomena in nineteenth century science: evolution. Today we tend to take the Sclaterian regions for granted, yet they are an incredibly powerful and little-researched scientific tool of extraordinary endurance. This talk tracks some of the social, economic, and political means by which the Sclaterian regions intertwine different fields of knowledge and continue to be have been implicated in the perpetuation of hierarchical stereotypes about plants, humans, and non-human animals.
