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Gardens encourage planning for the future, providing a well-defined environment where people can play with and express a particular idea.
Professor Astrid Schwarz of Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany describes a type of human of the garden, Homo hortensis, who exists in contrast to the human of technology, Homo faber.
The adaptability of the garden and the gardener offers insight into improving resilience in the face of the challenges presented by the Anthropocene.
Hydrotechnical and ecological principles of water resources management for a mined-out mine field
(2024)
The article considers the issue of predicting and managing water resources of flooded mines based on hydrotechnical and ecological criteria. Reproduction of a natural-technogenic situation within mine fields with many unknowns regarding the condition of a rock massif and influence factors became possible through a step-by-step construction and identification of a numerical geofiltration model. Balance components of formation for a technogenic underground water mode, capacity parameters and zonal water permeability of a rock massif are estimated as a result of methodical adaptation and creation of a hydrodynamic model of two adjacent mines with a complex hydrogeological structure. A duration and speed for groundwater level restoration at different time periods, an area of underflooding and flooding on the surface is established according to predictive calculations. The inefficiency of submersible pumps use is proven when capital workings lose their drainage functions and a massif has rheological dynamics. Variants for long-term pumping of mine waters with subsequent discharge into a hydrographic network do not bring the territory into a self-draining mode. Therefore, the mode of closing mines with full restoration of underground water level in a monitoring mode with a combination of drainage reconstruction of the surface is the most acceptable.
Since its adoption by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2003, the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage has been steadily growing in popularity across the world, to date having been ratified by 93 per cent of the UNESCO Member States. Both praised and cursed for its impacts, the 2003 Convention has attracted the attention of not only professionals and practitioners but also heritage studies scholarship. Stefano’s book adds to this growing body of knowledge by engaging with the safeguarding scheme promoted under this UNESCO Convention. Framing the discussion around the demand for ‘community participation’, Stefano reveals the obstacles inherent in the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage (ICH) safeguarding scheme while actively seeking means to overcome them. Written in an accessible manner for both researchers and professionals, the book should appeal to all those interested in heritage safeguarding and in what community participation really means in practice
The volume “The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme: Key Aspects and Recent Developments”, co-edited by Ray Edmondson, Lothar Jordan and Anca Claudia Prodan, brings together 21 authors to respond to the growing interest in the scientific study of this UNESCO initiative. The aim is to encourage academic research on MoW in the context of Heritage Studies and beyond. Published in 2020, the volume is so far the only one offering reflections for study on the MoW Programme. It further surveys an important chapter in the history of MoW, during which there have been fundamental changes in its profile and operation.
This chapter explores the potential that critically oriented perspectives hold for broadened insights about the heritage value of digital documents. Digital technology has significantly changed the way documents are conceptualized, created, accessed, transmitted and preserved, and digital documents are characterized by features that challenge established perspectives. Although any of these features may hold heritage significance, digital documentary heritage is poorly represented in the context of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), in particular on the International Memory of the World Register, which contains a selection of some of the most globally representative documents in any form, including the digital. Observing that libraries and archives, and their underlying disciplines, which have informed MoW, have been dominated by positivism, this chapter builds on the assumption that approaching documents too narrowly entails the risk of overlooking the manifold significance they could have. Consequently, I suggest that moving away from positivism and adopting critical perspectives might help us understand more comprehensively the manifold heritage significance of digital documents. For illustration, I am using the example of software, and I discuss how the adoption of critical perspectives enables broadened insights about the significance of software, not just as a component in a digital document but also as a document in its own right.
The Introduction begins by describing the aims and the background of the book The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme: Key Aspects and Recent Developments. The aim is to stimulate the development of systematic education and research on the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), especially in the context of the other United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) heritage programs. It is intended as a basic tool for students and young or established researchers from the field of Heritage Studies or related fields and disciplines, as well as for practitioners with scientific interests. The main inspirations came from the International Graduate School Heritage Studies in Cottbus (Germany) and from the Sub-Committee on Education and Research (SCEaR) of MoW. As this book is the first of its kind on MoW, it is a pioneering endeavor. The Introduction explains how this fact has led to the choice of authors – many of them leading experts and practitioners within MoW – and shaped its approaches, combining reflections, reports, essays, and research contributions. The Introduction elucidates the structure of the book, which is divided into six sections, including afterwords by each of the editors, and it offers summaries of the individual chapters. It concludes with a basic guide to UNESCO itself, together with its normative (legal) instruments, bodies and Guidelines of relevance to MoW.
This chapter provides reflections on the role MoW could play in the context of Heritage Studies, enlarging its scope. It starts by problematizing the lack of visibility of the Memory of the World Programme (MoW) in Heritage Studies, and in the “mainstream heritage discourse”, which have centred on the two most popular UNESCO normative tools for heritage: The Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, respectively. Arguing that MoW should take its rightful place among other heritage concepts, the chapter provides examples in support. They show that MoW has the potential to broaden our understanding of the intersections between heritage and human rights, of the dichotomy tangible-intangible and of the notion of community involvement. At the same time, also MoW would benefit from being anchored in Heritage Studies, where, through theorization, a scientifically grounded justification could emerge for why documentary heritage is worth our efforts.
This essay provides a conceptual contribution to the understanding of solidarity rights and their relevance in an increasingly interconnected world, focusing on the common heritage of humanity. The analysis lies at the intersection of human rights with international heritage law, two areas that have developed along different historical trajectories. Recently policymakers and scholars have emphasized their interrelationships, suggesting that heritage is a human right, that human rights provide a framework for heritage protection, and that human rights themselves are a common heritage of humanity. Yet less attention has been given to the fact that the common heritage of humanity is also a principle of international law. As a legal formulation of the stewardship philosophy known in many religions and cultures, the common heritage of humanity embodies altruistic, equalitarian, and moral ideals. It is at the same time a controversial principle, because it introduces humanity as subject of law and triggers duties of solidarity and commitments that challenge state sovereignty. Drawing on the common heritage of humanity as principle of law in different historical and legal contexts, this essay explores its potential to illustrate the underlying message of solidarity rights and the implications of solidarity rights.
Ausgehend von meiner Expertise in Technikphilosophie und Ökologie beschäftige ich mich mit der Beobachtung und Beschreibung der Genese und Transformation von Objekten und Prozessen in einer technisierten Umwelt. Die Objekte können im wissenschaftlichen Kontext entstanden sein und für die Alltagspraxis relevant werden, die Prozesse epistemischer, technischer oder sozioökologischer Art sein.
Mit der technisierten Umwelt sind in meiner Forschung Beziehungsgefüge von Natur, Technik und Mensch gemeint. Solche Beziehungsgefüge bieten sich an als produktiver Denk- und Aktionsraum, in dem Fragen nach der Entstehung von Entitäten aus Beziehungen und von Beziehungen aus Entitäten verfolgt werden. Sind die Objekte einfach da und gehen Relationen ein oder sind die Relationen vorrangig? Wie ist ein Smartphone oder eine Zuchtpflanze dann zu beschreiben, wie die Konstituierung, Durchdringung und Gestaltung des Untersuchungs-gegenstands zu verstehen? Damit schließen wir an Fragen an, wie sie im Forschungsbereich des sogenannten neuen Materialismus gestellt werden.
Im Gegensatz zum Homo faber schlägt sich der Homo hortensis nicht auf die Seite der technischen Hervorbringung. Er ist angewiesen auf den Umgang mit inhomogenen, ‚unreinen‘ Ensembles und kann so im Zeitalter des Anthropozän ein interessantes Handlungsangebot machen. Der Umgang mit der Verschränkung von Natürlichem und Artifiziellem, von Handwerk, Technik und Wissenschaft ist der gärtnerischen Praxis inhärent und dies schon seit Jahrhunderten. Der Homo hortensis ist ein genuin technowissenschaftlicher Mensch, dem der Garten ein technologisches
Produkt von handwerklich und wissenschaftlich ko-produziertem Wissen ist, das immer wieder neu in der Auseinandersetzung mit der vom Garten hervorgebrachten Ordnung ausgehandelt wird. Der Garten nötigt zur Situiertheit, fordert als Gegenüber dem Gärtner permanent eine Positionierung in seinem gärtnerischen Handeln ab. Darin unterscheidet sich der Homo hortensis von anderen Formen des gärtnerischen
Managements etwa im Geoengineering, in der industriellen Landwirtschaft, auch vieler Nachhaltigkeitsindustrien. Der Homo hortensis ist eine Fortschreibung des Arendt’schen Zoon politicon, gestaltend muss er die Grenzen seines intervenierenden Handelns permanent verhandeln mit einem Gegenüber, das ihm eine Ordnung
setzt.
A wave of applications for private concessions to build run-of-the-river dams swept Costa Rica during the 2010s. These hydroelectric project plans caused concern among residents adjacent to the targeted rivers to the extent that a water conflict erupted in several communities of the southern Pacific side of the country. In this article, I use a multi-sited ethnographic approach, including a visual analysis, to explore the resistance of local people to
these plans. My focus is on the contestation over the assumptions about water that are present in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report of a hydroelectric project plan. By showing the underlying socioenvironmental imaginaries that underpin the conflict over dam development, my article reveals ontological differences between institutionalised and non-institutionalised ways of knowing (and relating to) water. Reflecting on what I consider to be ontological disjunctions, I conclude that some of the technical aspects of the EIA report – such as the here-employed notion of environmental flow, which is estimated using only a hydrological approach – have constituted a technical orthodoxy, or dogma, that requires a rethinking of the institutionally dominant assumptions about the understanding and being of water and rivers in southern Costa Rica.
An der Schwelle zum 20. Jahrhundert war die wissenschaftliche Ökologie noch so gut wie gar nicht präsent, das Ökosystem und auch der Begriff ‚Umwelt‘ als Fachbegriffe noch nicht in der Welt und schon gar nicht in der Bedeutung eines ‚Umweltproblems‘. Das ökologische Denken nahm also im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts enorm an Fahrt auf, und es wurde dabei befeuert durch kosmologische Denkfiguren, wie sie insbesondere im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert verbreitet waren. Argumentieren möchte ich, dass diese Kosmos-Imaginationen als relationale Gefüge konstituierend für die ökologische Theoriebildung wurden und es bis heute geblieben sind. Die ökologische Einbildungskraft lässt sich in all jenen Zwischenräumen ausmachen, die durch Projekte auf dem Weg der epistemischen Reinigungsarbeit von kulturellen und literarischen Imaginationen hin zu einer wissenschaftlichen Ökologie überhaupt erst entstanden.
Current efforts to integrate heritage practices in the sustainable management of wetlands in postcolonial nation-states assume that these practices have always existed in the forms they are now. The colonial order, whether deliberately or otherwise, suppressed many local traditional practices. The postcolonial authority’s adoption of Western science invariably continued the suppression, albeit in a more liberal form. In the Ramsar Convention, natural scientists were assigned the role of conserving wetlands ‘‘for the benefit of humankind in a way compatible with the maintenance of natural properties of the ecosystem.’’ This became known as the wise use principle. This article highlights the history of the Keta wetlands and proposes an integration of key knowledge holders into management plans for a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states. The colonial and postcolonial regimes made the knowledge holders invisible. Modern imaginaries – Western legal institutions, Western science and Christianity – were privileged over local heritage practices. It therefore requires historical and heritage expertise to uncover local sustainable knowledge for integration into the Ramsar management plan, hence a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states.
Nebst dem omnipräsenten Cat-Industrial Complex findet sich im World Wide Web etwas versteckter der möglicherweise umfangreichste schriftliche Fragenkatalog, der jemals von Menschen angelegt wurde. Erstmals von Eugene Miya und Mark Horton in den 1980er-Jahren auf dem Use- und Arpanet zu FAQs gebündelt, zeichnet das Archiv in seinem heterogenen Dasein ein unscharfes, organisches, sich ständig wandelndes Bild menschlicher Fragekultur. Frequently Asked Questions - und die damit implizierten Frequently Answered Questions - rücken in neuartiger Bündelung auf sogenannten Q&A-Websites – wie beispielsweise Quora, Ask.com, gutefrage.net, Yahoo!Answers oder Stack Exchange – nebst der ursprünglichen angelegten Listenform zunehmend ein Community-Prinzip ins Zentrum ihrer Dienste. So wandelten sich zahlreiche 'Hilf-Dir-Selbst-Initiativen' von Listen zu umfangreichen Online-Hilfekolosse, die in Ihrer Komplexität nicht zuletzt ökonomischen und technologischen Kriterien genügen müssen. Dabei werden Fragen und Antworten schon lange nicht mehr gelistet und zur Verfügung gestellt. Viel mehr wird ein von den Communities und Users auf Q&A-Websites erarbeitetes Wissen als wertvolles Handelsgut verstanden. Unklar bleibt dabei jedoch, aus welchen Komponenten das verhandelte Wissen überhaupt besteht und welche Mehrwerte dieses generieren soll. Die vorliegende Publikation infiltriert fragend, als spekulatives Tutorial angelegt, den sogenannten Knowledge Market.
This book offers critical and insightful discussions on successes and failures of implementing the 1972 World Heritage Convention. It presents creative, people-centric solutions and strategies to strengthen heritage protection and short and long term use. It examines new heritage challenges, including climate change, global governance, and urban development
This chapter provides reflections on the consequences of technological change in relation to World Heritage properties. While technological change is a core means of human adaptation and survival, it becomes a risk if the pace is too fast. This has increasingly affected societies worldwide since the industrial revolution, resulting in many negative consequences for people and the environment. Technological change is also associated with positive developments, such as those brought about by digital technology. Insights into both risks and opportunities are given in this chapter, and they are illustrated with examples, such as mining and digital geomedia. Technological change appears as a double-edged sword, but there is currently no methodology for assessing its consequences for World Heritage properties. Therefore, the chapter turns to lessons learnt from the Historic Urban Landscape approach, the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme, and from impact assessment methods. While these provide useful inspiration and a basis for further reflection, the chapter concludes by emphasizing the necessity of a methodology for assessing the impacts of technological change on World Heritage properties against the background of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The papers by Marco Tamborini „Philosophy of Biorobotics: Translating and Composing Biohybrid Forms“ and Astrid Schwarz „Composing and Combining: Opposing Constructive Principles?“ outline different positions on mimesis and composition as the fundamental practices of homo faber. A critical commentary seeks to highlight their differences. Tamborini specifies homo faber as homo translator who moves between different media of presentation and expression. Reproduction in another medium entails a back and forth which defines the work of the translator: a novel is reproduced by a film, the movement of a salamander is reproduced by a machine, an architectural design is reproduced by a physical building. Schwarz promotes homo hortensis who practices gardening, widely understood, in different ways – by composing and imposing a plan, or by combining and incorporating the dynamics of physical and biological processes. She foregrounds a creative and constructive act which is profoundly mundane in that it assimilates the world into the works of technology and art. Engineers, designers, architects, and planners are gardeners of sorts in that they are world-makers, tending to works and worlds. This resonates, of course, with ideas of the anthropocene and the epochal role of humans in planetary affairs. – The authors then respond constructively to the critical commentary, seeking common ground among the three positions.
Abstract
The distinction between the constructive principles of combining and composing is discussed in terms of works of art, nature, and technology. How is the work that emerges from these different principles ultimately constituted and perceived as a definable entity and how is this important for the philosophy of technology? In contrast to composition, combining is presented as a strategy to give more importance to the processual, to the various spatial and temporal couplings and decoupling of the components of a work, to their relationship to their surroundings and also to the relatedness of the observer to the work. Gardenworks can stand for principles of combination as well as principles of composition. They are nature-culture hybrid forms, examples are discussed referring to 17th and 18th-century pleasure gardens. The emphasis on the principle of combination in the case of the English landscape garden ultimately produced a model for a sociotechnical handling with nature-culture constellations based on a policy of democratic principles. This combinational play in the garden can also be seen as a suitable heuristic for dealing with the comprehensive transformation processes occurring in the Anthropocene and for practicing corresponding forms of action.
Supposedly, digitalisation offers new capacities and directions for environmental politics and governance. This chapter critically introduces the discursive trajectories of three 'developments', sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist acceleration. Analytically, I approach these trajectories with the sociology of promises, environmental sociology and science and technology studies. To illustrate how subjects and environments are differently (con)figured at the intersection of these trajectories, I attend to two contexts and ask for each how subjects and environments are (con)figured. The contexts are global discourses and local dispositifs of smart cities and of carbon accounting/datafication. The chapter concludes in terms of digitalisation as promissory infrastructural relations that cut across these contexts. This raises avenues for critical environmental politics studies that are sensitive to discourses and dispositifs of greening in relation to recent innovations in analytics that recognise both epistemic/epistemological and ontic/ontological politics. With such attention, interesting problematisations and questions about transformative and conservative potentials emerge.
It is now becoming clear that climate change is and increasingly will be the biggest challenge facing the world. Yet, far less clear, is how to integrate climate change into schooling to cultivate enduring educational experiences. The goals of this paper are twofold. The first is to explore and identify the visions and trends that guide climate change educational research. In this sense, we aimed to answer the following question: what visions and roles does climate change educational research propose (and also foreclose) for children and teachers in a changing world? To address this question, we conducted a literature review of about fifty relevant publications on education and climate change spanning across countries in the last decade. Our findings indicate that the emphasis of climate change educational research so far has been mainly on the literacy rate of pupils and teachers, and also on the conceptualizations and framing of this theme. This means that, for the most part, climate change educational research has been concerned with visions of deficits of knowledge and misunderstandings of basic scientific principles, especially by pupils.
Drawing from a variety of influences, such as critical pedagogy, cultural, and science studies, the second goal of this paper is to assess the main implications of such visions and roles enacted through climate change educational research. In this sense, we critically highlight the functions that they propose for children and teachers in a world of shifting climates where increasing uncertainty is inescapable. As a result of this discussion, we urge a reassessment of learning about climate change in the classrooms based on more socially and ecologically situated explorations that overcome the limitations of current trends in climate change educational research.
Ecotechnology
(2022)
Ecotechnology is both broad and widespread, yet it has never been given a universally shared definition; this remains the case even in the early 21st century. Given that it is used in the natural, engineering, and social sciences, as well as in design studies, in the philosophy and history of technology and in science policy, perhaps this is not surprising. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to come up with an unambiguous definition for ecotechnology: It should be understood rather as an umbrella term that facilitates connections among different scientific fields and science policy and, in so doing, offers a robust trading zone of ideas and concepts. The term is part of a cultural and sociopolitical framework and, as such, wields explanatory power. Ecotechnology approaches argue for the design of ensembles that embed human action within an ecologically functional environment and mediating this relationship by technological means. Related terms, such as ecotechnics, ecotechniques, ecotechnologies, and eco-technology, are used similarly.
In the 1970s, “ecotechnology,” along with other terms, gave a voice to an unease and a concern with sociotechnical transformations. This eventually gave rise to the first global environmental movement expressing a comprehensive eco-cultural critique of society-environment relations. Ecotechnology was part of the language used by activists, as well as by social theorists and natural scientists working in the transdisciplinary field of applied ecology. The concept of ecotechnology helped to both establish and “smooth over” environmental matters of concern in the worlds of economics, science, and policymaking. The process of deliberation about a green modernity is still ongoing and characterizes the search for a constructive intermediation between artificial and natural systems following environmentally benign design principles.
During the 1980s, disciplinary endeavors flourished in the global academic world, lending ecotechnology more and more visibility. Some of these endeavors, such as restoration ecology and ecological engineering, were rooted in the engineering sciences, but mobilized quite different traditions, namely population biology and systems biology. To date, ecotechnology has been replaced by and large by other terms in applied ecology. Another strand of work resulted in the discipline of social ecology, which developed different focal points, most notably critical political economy and a concern with nature-culture issues in the context of cultural ecology. Finally, more recently, ecotechnology has been discussed in several branches of philosophy that offer different narratives about the epistemic and ontological transformations triggered by an “ecologization” of societies and a theoretical turn toward relationality.
For the past two decades, dozens of rivers in Costa Rica have been threatened by the plans of hydroelectric developers to build private run-of-the-river dams. Local communities adjacent to the rivers located between the Talamanca Mountain range and the Pacific Ocean stopped this attempt at hydroextractive expansion after a years-long struggle against dams and in defense of life. Based on a multi-species ethnography, in this article I show how the otters that inhabit these rivers, are also protagonists of this struggle. To do so, I expose the multi-species coalition formed in these communities in response to the absence of otters in the Environmental Impact Assessment of the San Rafael hydroelectric project.
新冠与身体环境:生态技术的探究
(2021)
Methods have been recognised in STS as mattering for a long time. STS ethnographies establish a boundary object with which STS scholars weave a pattern: From such ethnographic accounts we learn that knowledge is produced locally. Ethnography has over the recent decades been highlighted as a key method in STS. And that STS ethnography is specifically shaped by being often configured to consider its forms of collaboration or intervention in the field. This special issue focuses on how methods matter, specifically on how STS ethnographic collaboration and its data are translated into ethnographic writing, or performative of other reality effects. Exploring STS’s own methods-in-action brings to attention the messy landscape of method practice. Our objective in this exploration is to develop a genre of writing about method that fosters response-ability and enables the audience of research output to position themselves between the research materials and practices that were invested into the study. This special issue hopes to contribute to STS engagement with its methods by way of methodography. Methodography serves as a genre of analytic writing, that articulates specificity and scrutinises the situated practices of producing STS knowledge.
Die hier versammelten Texte entstanden im Zusammenhang unserer ersten Ringvorlesung in Cottbus 2017/18 und wurden von Vortragendenden beigesteuert sowie von Studierenden, die auf diese Vorträge reagierten. Wir bedanken uns sehr herzlich bei Allen, die zum Gelingen dieser interessanten Begegnungen beigetragen haben. „Technik und Spiel“ ist ein Thema, das sich quer durch die Wissenschaft und durch verschiedene Epochen zieht, entsprechend vielfältig sind die Gegenstandsbereiche, die sich teilweise bis in die Alltagsgeschichte ausdehnen. Gemeinsam ist den Texten, daß die Konjunktion „Technik und Spiel“ ernst genommen und aus verschiedenen Perspektiven nach dem Spielerischen im technischen Handeln und mit technischen Objekten gefragt wird.
Die Texte in diesem Band wurden im Rahmen einer Lehrveranstaltung im Modul „Philosophy of Technology and Nature“ geschrieben. Der Kurs setzt sich zusammen aus verschiedenen Studiengängen, die Studierenden kommen aus Ländern der ganzen Welt. Gegenstand der Vorlesungen und Seminare sind die Vorstellungen von Technik und Natur, die Geschichte dieses Verhältnisses, und die unterschiedlichen Konzeptualisierungen insbesondere in der westlichen Welt. Die Konzeptualisierung der Natur als Wildnis spielt hier eine wichtige Rolle, eingeführt wurde diese Problematik mit der Lektüre und Diskussion eines Kapitels aus dem einschlägigen Buch von William Cronnon (1996) “The trouble with wilderness”. Die Studierenden wurden aufgefordert einen Essay von maximal 3 Seiten zum Thema “My Wilderness” zu schreiben auf der Basis von Methoden des kreativen Schreibens. In der folgenden Sitzung wurde eine Lesung veranstaltet, wobei immer andere als die Autor*innen die Texte vorlasen. Jenseits der Lehrveranstaltung, wurden sämtliche nun vorliegenden Texte noch einmal redigiert und mit Bildern versehen.
With the thesis «Without a frame there is no landscape» I suggest to draw attention to the praxis of a relationship to nature that comes into play when we look at a part of nature as landscape. It is discussed why it should be ascribed neither completely to the realm of a concept which alone constitutes landscape nor to a completely concept-free mode of acting and seeing. Instead, the framing of landscape must be linked to a quite particular praxis: boundaries must be drawn, details defined, materials selected and formed – paper, wood, plants, paving. The frame theory suggests three forms of landscape all being «really constructed». The practical significance of framing is discussed using the example of Kant’s landscaped garden, Humboldt’s landscape, and Greenaway’s cinematic garden drawings. It is shown that, for the time being at least, we will not be able to escape the mode of framed landscape.
This part investigates some of the limits and contradictions of management of the environment and its resources, through detailed discussions of key dimensions of applied environmental management. This part introduces studies of 1) resource management (rivers as well as recycling), 2) specific techniques drawn on in corporate and public environmental management (suggestion schemes, and respectively, visualisation techniques), and finally, 3) policy discourses (Clean Development Mechanism). The studies presented here are linked by a common thread which recognises that the historicity of environmental management as a social practice requires us to scrutinise its specificity as a practical, social, cultural as well as political achievement. The ascension of science and modernity gave rise to a qualitative change in cultural conceptualisations of the human-nature relationship: nature became an object to be ‘managed’ by so-called experts. By now, however, environmental management has come under critique in that what it proposes as solutions may simultaneously comprise the causes of environmental problems. First, the means used by environmental management can be identified as instances of modernism, industrialism as well as capitalism. Second, scholars of environmental problems criticise the ‘instruments’ of environmental ‘management’ for reproducing the problems, rather than solving them. To examine how environmental problems ought to be approached a critical stance is now seen as essential. Necessarily then, do issues of ideology, epistemology and theory crop up.
New markets are key in debates concerning environmental regimes. Critics and proponents share a discourse that characterises environmental markets in terms of scale; many discuss how to scale environmental markets ‘the right way’. Building on previous work in human geography, actor–network theory, and governmentality studies, we unpack the dual but always interwoven politics of scale-making in doing environmental policies, which consists of material-semiotic practices of producing and using scales as ontologically real ordering devices. Drawing from the results of three studies conducted independently by the authors, we analyse material-semiotic scale-making practices in different ways of enacting environmental markets. By revealing the dual politics of scale production and use in environmental markets, our analysis contributes to the study of developing and implementing environmental governance.
Herrschende Umweltpolitik will evidenzbasiert sein, will Umweltfakten nutzen. Auf Grundlage einer Ethnografie der Produktion betrieblicher CO2-Fußabdrücke werden Umweltfakten als Effekt von Arbeit und Datenverarbeitung analysiert. Arbeitspraktisch existiert Umwelt in einem hybriden und taktischen Datenraum. Daraus ergeben sich umweltpolitische Implikationen, die sowohl die Prämissen ökologischer Modernisierung wie auch staatlicher Umweltkontrolle infrage stellen.
Wir entwickeln eine kritische studentische Perspektive auf Nachhaltigkeitspolitik an Hochschulen. Dabei betrachten wir den reduzierenden Fokus hochschulischer Nachhaltigkeistarbeit auf Umweltmanagementsysteme im Verhältnis auf die Potentiale der Hinterfragung von Lehre und Forschung aus der Perspektive des Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurses. Für einen Prozess der nachhaltigen Hochschulentwicklung erscheint als wesentlich, Studium, hochschulpolitische Engagementmöglichkeiten sowie Forschung selbst zum Objekt von Nachhaltigkeitsdiskussionen in den Vordergrund zu stellen.
Attempting to tackle climate change with market solutions hinges on the existence of emissions. We know much about the politics of undoing emissions – via offsets. But where do emissions come from? How are they done? Carbon footprinting seems to be the simple answer. Is this merely a ‘technical’ matter? I explore how emissions come into being; carbon accounting emerges as techno-political practice, fraught with non-transparency.
This chapter argues that ‘successful’ corporate carbon accounting practices efficiently and skilfully ignore significant political implications of the company's practical relation to climate change. ‘Successful’ in this case signifies what matters for the company to compete well in capitalist markets. By examining voluntary carbon accounting at a financial services corporation, I invite an engagement with how the technicality and politics of carbon interrelate in accounting. I ground my analysis in ethnographic fieldwork across 20 months in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) unit at one of the 50 largest companies globally. Over this period, I supported the CSR unit’s management of their sustainability data, in exchange for overt and explicit research access to the CSR unit’s activities.
In, with and of STS
(2020)
How do we narrate about how we ‘use’ STS for social scientific research? How do we study STS research practices? Do all research practices that involve STS concepts contribute to STS? This text constitutes the afterword to an edited volume that contributes to providing answers in the borderlands of these questions. The afterword problematises how we perform reflexivity, how we are (not) analysing STS's own research practices, and how we tell simultaneous stories of what STS as a field is or might be. With this problematisation, this essay argues for a praxeography of STS, involving methodographic, conceptographic and cartographic analyses.
Verran, Helen
(2020)
Helen Verran is a postcolonial historian and philosopher of science at Charles Darwin University in Australia. Her contributions, addressing concepts’ performances and effects, are groundbreaking in the study of generalising logics, difference, and ontological politics. This analysis of how concepts get enacted responds to key challenges of social sciences and humanities inquiry.Verran’s ‘relational empiricism’ analyses the many and various practices of conceptualising and their effects. Making relations is a central practice in conceptualising and, thus, part of her analysis. Her approach is relational in that the concepts she analyses are understood as doing something: They relate and separate entities. It is empirical as Verran analyses embodied experiences of worlds/worldings. Central in relational empiricism is the inquiry into tensions and overlaps between concepts as doing differences. Verran is best known for her ethnographic work, particularly on the concept of ‘number’ (Lippert & Verran, 2018; Verran, 2001).For Verran, concepts are not merely an intellectual category. Rather, concepts are also embodied and lived, collectively shared and performed in ‘repeated routine performances’ (Verran, 2001, p. 157). In Verran’s material-semiotic analysis, concepts have a realness and are performed or reperformed in situations. This renders concepts as particular in time and place.A world shaped by particular and situated concepts, then, is a world of differences. These differences are not threatening but workable, albeit amid generative dissensus. This take allows possibilities for creating ‘futures that are different from the past’ (Verran, 2001, p. 35). Verran has developed analytical tools for recognising and doing difference together, for ongoing relating and going-on with others.Before this entry presents three Verranian tools, it locates Verran’s work and influences. Then, it introduces and illustrates Verran’s key method—storytelling—and presents central tools. The final section addresses politics in Verran’s work.
In a context of increasing liberalization and privatization of the energy sector in Costa Rica, a wave of applications for private concessions to build run-of-the-river dams has swept over the country during the last decade. These hydroelectric projects have caused concern among residents adjacent to the targeted rivers to the extent that a socioenvironmental conflict has erupted in several communities in the southern Pacific side of the country, which I refer to as “water worlds”. I use the term “water worlds” both to transcend the limits of a human-focused notion of community, and to refer to the mutually sustaining confluence of relations between the materiality of water, human and non-human living beings, knowledge claims and practices (acts-of-knowing) and their corresponding socioenvironmental imaginaries in particular territories and river water areas. This dissertation focuses on the acts-of-knowing and the underlying socioenvironmental imaginaries of these “water worlds”.
My empirical study seeks a postphemenological ethnographic approach, and draws theoretical connections between Cornelius Castoriadis and Science & Technology Studies. Using advocacy research, it was conducted in 34 fieldwork sites, involved 14 unstructured interviews and dozens of conversations with community participants, and drew on numerous documents and visual resources.
My analysis shows how:
The Environmental Impact Study (EIS) report of the San Rafael River over-simplifies the knowledge capacities of neighbor communities and environmental groups. The EIS report does not fully take into account knowledge about biophysical dynamics that members of the communities are able to co-create using alternative acts-of-knowing, such as: (i) giving attention to historical perspectives, (ii) embodying practices, and (iii) creating community coalitions in response to perceived knowledge deficits.
Local communities co-create imaginaries of water worlds associated with ways of living and the maintenance of community relations, upon which rivers have significant influence. This notion of imaginaries as a life force of connectivity challenges the underlying (modern) assumptions and treatments of rivers, as expressed in the EIS report. That is, it defies the imaginary of rivers as quantifiable, determinable, divisible, and isolated from the human and non-human communities.
Multispecies encounters in daily situations represent an important element in understanding acts-of-knowing articulated by the local communities in the “water worlds” of this dissertation. Drawing from Cornelius Castoriadis’ perspective of living beings, I offer alternative imaginaries of the role of non-human animals in Costa Rica that are more intimate and affective than what I understand as mechanical and passive notions of non-human animals in the multiple spaces that they share together with humans.
Overall, this dissertation contributes to a deeper (and politically significant) understanding of acts-of-knowing in a particular conflict over (more than) water. In doing so, it contributes to existing work on sociotechnical and environmental imaginaries in Science & Technology Studies and political ecology by adopting a postphenomenological perspective, which aims to transcend taken-for-granted assumptions about acts-of-knowing under the sustainable development approach in Costa Rica.