Prof. Dr. Nina Wormbs

Nina Wormbs is an associate professor at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. She holds a PhD in history of technology and an MSc in engineering physics. Between 2010 and 2016, she was chair of said Division and in 2011 she cofounded KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory together with Sverker Sörlin. Wormbs has worked on media history with particular interest in the infrastructural dimensions of broadcasting in Sweden and the Nordic countries. She has also taken an interest in the electromagnetic spectrum as a natural resource. Recently, she has worked on remote sensing and how images of the planet from a distance affects our understanding of our global and local environment. At the RCC, Wormbs will work on a collection of essays where the common core is satellite technology as environing.

RCC Research Project: An Environing Technology: Satellites and the Perception of the Earth

Selected Publications:

• with Miyase Christensen. “Global Climate Talks from Failure to Cooperation and Hope: Swedish News Framings of COP15 and COP21.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture (2017): 1–18.
• with Sabine Höhler. “Remote Sensing: Digital Data at a Distance.” In Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research, edited by Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, and L. Anders Sandberg, 272–83. London: Routledge, 2017.
• with Sverker Sörlin. “Arctic Futures: Agency and Assessing Assessments.” In Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Expedition to the Era of Anthropocene, edited byLill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerståhl Stenport, 247–62. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
• “The Assessed Arctic: How Monitoring Can be Silently Normative.” In The New Arctic, edited by Birgitta Evengård, Joan Nyman Larsen, and Öyvind Paasche, 291–301. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015.
• “Eyes on the Ice: Satellite Remote Sensing and the Narratives of Visualized Data.” In Media and the Politics of Arctic Climate Change: When the Ice Breaks, edited by Miyase Christensen, Annika E. Nilsson, and Nina Wormbs, 52–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
• “Technology-Dependent Commons: The Example Of Frequency Spectrum for Broadcasting in Europe in the 1920s.” International Journal of the Commons 5, no. 1 (2011): 92–109.