Professor Steven Yearley, former IASH Director and current Fellow of IASH, will inaugurate a prestigious new international lecture series at Cornell University in the USA, delivering his talk on Earth Day, 22 April 2026.
Steve – who is Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in the School of Social and Political Science – will give the opening lecture in the Trevor Pinch Memorial Lecture Series for Innovative Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences.
His talk, titled "Sink Politics: Natural Knowledge and Climate Policy", will examine how scientists, environmental campaigners, climate-policy communities and national policymakers have understood and acted on carbon and greenhouse-gas "sinks" over the past three decades. Sinks in this sense refers to the natural absorption of carbon dioxide by processes such as dissolution in the oceans or uptake by trees, soils and shelled animals — a domain that has become an increasingly important and contested frontier in climate policy.
"Science and technology studies provides an excellent framework for analysing this case," said Professor Yearley. "Sink politics give us a powerful and perhaps hopeful insight into the co-making of knowledge, policy and territory."
Professor Yearley's current research focuses on coastal and marine carbon sinks around the UK and western Europe. His wider work has explored the challenges facing environmental campaign groups when mobilising scientific evidence, and the difficulties of translating scientific knowledge into official policy contexts. His most recently completed project formed part of a large-scale multidisciplinary network examining industrial decarbonisation options for the UK following Brexit and the pandemic.
The lecture series honours the late Trevor Pinch, Distinguished Professor at Cornell and a foundational figure in STS, who helped establish multiple fields of study and co-founded Cornell's Department of Science and Technology Studies. Professor Suman Seth, chair of that department, said: "We're delighted that our first speaker will be Steven Yearley from the University of Edinburgh. Steve's talk looks at climate politics and technoscientific knowledge and I anticipate that it will be lively, possibly contentious, and definitely fascinating." The lecture will take place at 3:30pm EDT (7:30pm BST) on Wednesday 22 April in Atkinson Hall, room 121, Cornell University. The event is free and open to the public. It can be watched online at https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/mediaid/1_t4bmktqc.