For Zoom link to this session, contact: j.e.wettre@sum.uio.no
In this seminar, Associate Professor Knox will present the main argument of her new book, Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, which came out last autumn. Based on ethnographic research that looked at attempts to bring climate science to bear on the governance of cities, the talk focuses on the methods deployed by people living and working in Manchester, UK, as they sought to make sense of their encounters with the ambivalent materiality of climate models. To understand these encounters and their methodological ramifications, Knox suggests we need to develop an understanding of climate not as a representation of an existing reality but a ‘form of thought’ whose contours are relational, but yet tangible, and whose ramifications are still being worked out. Building on the argument of this book Knox point to the methodological transformations this prompted in her own work, and end with some reflections on the directions that this research is taking her in now, presenting some nascent ideas about how to continue research in climate-thinking and its world-transforming possibilities.
Welcome!