Sessions

The sessions will provide a collaborative format to think together with text, colleagues and ethnographic materials about how social and environmental change is performed and enacted. In each session, we will take a text as a starting point to discuss questions, thoughts and ideas that arise from the participant’s ethnographic work. We are treating the texts as companion pieces to think with.  

If you want to join us for one or several sessions, you can find the session themes, texts, dates and meeting links here. We selected a main text and additional reading for each session. We also welcome suggestions for further reading from participants.  

18 July 2021
19 – 21h CEST
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1. Meeting green innovation

The first session locates our field of research somewhere between start-ups, climate change festival, corporate innovation, corporate environmentalism and activism.

Reading

  • Ritts, Max, and Karen Bakker. 2022. ‘New Forms: Anthropocene Festivals and Experimental Environmental Governance’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5 (1): 125–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619886974 
  • Bowen, Frances. 2014. ‘Perspectives on Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism’. In After Greenwashing: Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism and Society, 39–75. Organizations and the Natural Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139541213.003 

Further reading

  • Beuret, Nicholas. 2021. ‘Containing Climate Change: The New Governmental Strategies of Catastrophic Environments’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4 (3): 818–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620902384 
  • Ferns, George, and Kenneth Amaeshi. 2021. ‘Fueling Climate (In)Action: How Organizations Engage in Hegemonization to Avoid Transformational Action on Climate Change’. Organization Studies 42 (7): 1005–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840619855744 
  • Mann, Eric. 2016. ‘Environmentalism in the Corporate Climate’. Tikkun 31 (3): 26–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-3628173 
  • Góes, Helna Almeida de Araujo, Giovanna Colin Zeny, and Germano Glufke Reis. 2022. ‘When Justification Theory Meets Responsible Innovation: A Study of Cell-Based Meat’. Science, Technology and Society 27 (2): 256–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/09717218221075158 

15 August 2022
19 – 21h CEST
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2. Meetings

The second session will establish meetings as ethnographic objects.

Reading

  • Brown, Hannah, Adam Reed, and Thomas Yarrow. 2017. ‘Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Meeting. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (S1): 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12591 

29 August 2022
19 – 21h CEST
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3. Participation

In the third session, we draw on Chris Kelty’s The Participant to think about how and why people volunteer their time and labour in the Climate Change initiatives we’re observing and how this labour is conceptualised and put to work. We’ll focus on the first two chapters of Kelty’s book.

Reading

  • Kelty, Christopher M. 2019. Participation, Introduced. The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago (Ill.) London: The University of Chicago press.

12 September 2022
19 – 21h CEST
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4. Co-creation

The fourth session stays with participation shifting to the notion of co-creation.

Reading

  • Loorbach, Derk, Tim Schwanen, Brendan J. Doody, Peter Arnfalk, Ove Langeland, and Eivind Farstad. 2021. ‘Transition Governance for Just, Sustainable Urban Mobility: An Experimental Approach from Rotterdam, the Netherlands’. Journal of Urban Mobility 1 (December): 100009. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urbmob.2021.100009

26 September 2022
19 – 21h CEST
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5. Temporalities

The fifth session considers how time is enacted in hacking and the notions of change, speed and emergency, disruption and care that it orients towards.

Reading

  • Sareen, Siddharth, Devyn Remme, Katinka Wågsæther, and Håvard Haarstad. 2021. ‘A Matter of Time: Explicating Temporality in Science and Technology Studies and Bergen’s Car-Free Zone Development’. Energy Research & Social Science 78 (August): 102128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102128. 

Further reading & viewing

10 October 2022
19 – 21h CEST
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6. Scale

In the sixth session we revisit Doreen Massey’s ‘A Global Sense of Place’ to think about how scale is enacted? How is the big enacted in small meetings, and what metaphors and practices link the small meeting with massive global challenges, and the small us inside to the big them out there? And how does scaling-up feature, as a promise and practice? 

Reading

  • Massey, Doreen. 2008. ‘A Global Sense of Place’. In The Cultural Geography Reader, edited by Tim Oakes and Patricia Lynn Price. London ; New York: Routledge. 

25 October 2022
19 – 21h CEST
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7. Data

In the seventh session, we’ll examine how big data practices feature in the Climate Change initiatives we follow.  

Reading

  • Espinoza, Maria I, and Melissa Aronczyk. 2021. ‘Big Data for Climate Action or Climate Action for Big Data?’ Big Data & Society 8 (1): 205395172098203. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720982032  

14 November 2022
19.30-21-30 CEST
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8. Hacking anthropology

In the eighth session, we’ll use Hacking Anthropology by Hannah Knox to think about how the practice of meeting to hack, or hackathons, in which we partake ethnographically speaks back to our practice as anthropologists and the conceptions of change and value that inform our work. Further, we’re interested in how hacking technical data and code is related to notions of social change  

Reading