Carolyn Taratko receives Emmy Noether Award for her project »Cooling the Global South«
Carolyn Taratko, Research Associate at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History (ZZF Potsdam) has received funding to establish her junior research group »Cooling the Global South: Technology, Society, and Thermal Regulation in the 20th Century« through the German Research Council’s (DFG) Emmy Noether Program.
Beginning in November 2024, the research group will investigate the significance of technologies and practices of producing and maintaining cold over the decades after 1945, spanning decolonization and economic integration.
The research group will run for six years and is based in Department V: »Globalizations in a Divided World« at the ZZF. Taratko will lead the group and supervise two doctoral students.
The project explores how the production and regulation of cold influenced Europe’s relations to countries in the Global South. Colonial scientific knowledge, with its theories of race that supported ideas that tropical settings were unhealthy and depleting and that their inhabitants were intellectually inferior or lazy, outlived the formal end of colonial empires. At the same time, these ideas about artificial cold as desirable and comfortable in part influenced plans for postcolonial modernization projects.
Since the end of World War II, European states saw themselves confronted with rapidly changing relationships to the warmer regions of the world. These were influenced by decolonization, Cold War rivalries, and inequalities resulting from the effects of climate change. The project of global governance faced serious challenges. »Investigating the history of cold allows us to observe how expert knowledge and planning created a web of highly differentiated spaces,« Carolyn Taratko explained. »In this way, the project investigates how thermal discourses and practices influenced development plans in non-European contexts,« according the ZZF researcher.
The Emmy Noether Program is open to researchers at an early stage in their careers. It allows exceptionally qualified early career researchers the chance to qualify for the post of professor by leading an independent research group for a period of six years.
Profile Carolyn Taratko https://zzf-potsdam.de/en/mitarbeiter/carolyn-taratko
Information on the Emmy Noether Program
https://www.dfg.de/de/foerderung/foerdermoeglichkeiten/programme/einzelfoerderung/emmy-noether
Wissenschaftlicher Ansprechpartner:
Dr. Carolyn Taratko carolyn.taratko@zzf-potsdam.de
Weitere Informationen:
https://zzf-potsdam.de Website ZZF Potsdam
https://twitter.com/zzfpotsdam X
https://www.instagram.com/zzfpotsdam/
https://de-de.facebook.com/ZZF.Potsdam
Die semantisch ähnlichsten Pressemitteilungen im idw
![](https://files.idw-online.de/loading.gif)