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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Elpers
(Meertens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Michaela Fenske (Universität Würzburg)
Silja Klepp (Kiel University)
Arnika Peselmann (Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg)
Domenica Farinella (University of Messina)
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- Formats:
- Panel Roundtable
- Stream:
- Environment
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The panel and roundtable discuss approaches to climate change adaption. The focus is on knowledge in its diverse forms and manifestations, knowledge transfers, hierarchies of knowledge and resulting everyday practices, narrations and materializations of climate change adaptions.
Long Abstract:
The panel and roundtable will discuss approaches to climate change adaptation. The focus will be on knowledge in its diverse forms and manifestations, knowledge transfers and hierarchies of knowledge related to climate change. In which everyday practices, narrations and materializations of climate change adaptation do those result?
The integration of diverse forms of knowledge - from local knowledge, tacit and explicit knowledge, to the knowledge of (natural) scientists, engineers and policymakers - is considered as crucial for the success of sustainable climate change adaptation, however it is also described as precarious and difficult (Nightingale et al., 2020). Ethical questions, legal conceptions, societal inequalities and power relations come into view. The panel and roundtable aim to get a better understanding of those dynamics.
For the panel we are looking forward to contributions on case studies. The roundtable will post more general questions about climate change adaptation and knowledge. What can ethnological knowledge contribute? How can research projects integrate everyday knowledge and provide participation from the very beginning? Which opportunities does artistic research offer? What are the configurations of knowledge and power we can observe. We invite short provocations/presentations in order to stimulate the discussion.
This panel+roundtable is meant on the one hand to gather different anthropological perspectives employed in this research field and to reflect upon the diverse experiences that are made by colleagues working in this realm. On the other hand, we wish to generate opportunities for networking to enhance future collaborations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The contribution discusses how knowledges of different stakeholders gather around the transformation of specific streets and links to the question how do conflicts between knowledge systems materialize in urban space
Paper long abstract:
In the context of the climate change mitigation the transport transition (“Verkehrswende”) is a key factor. Environmentalism has gained substantial ground in public debate, but its underlying logics are still contested. Should a city street be an infrastructure that serves “the car” or can it be a multifunctional space that also supports green space and ecological and social practices? The answers to this question stem from different knowledge systems (“Wissensordnungen”). This contribution focuses on two aspects. Firstly on the (divergent) knowledge about a good life in the city and a successful transport transformation and secondly on the views of activists and their practices - with which they accept, reject or reinterpret the prevailing knowledge, the resulting policy measures as well as urban spaces. It analyses what potential is there in ecological narratives and in everyday (protesting) practices for coping with global environmental change at local level. Fraunhoferstraße, Herzog-Wilhelm-Straße und Schwanthalerstraße are three streets in Munich, Germany, that are currently in the process of transformation. In this process diverging knowledge systems and different ideas of a successful traffic transformation result in heterogeneous conflicts. This contribution deals with the following questions: How are those conflicts influenced by different knowledge systems and how do they materialize in urban spaces?
Paper short abstract:
This paper problematizes the process of designing research and creating transdisciplinary knowledge about bio-social adaptive strategies to urban overheating. Building on an ongoing research project, it reflects on challenges and potentialities such an approach brings to climate change adaptation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper stems from an ongoing research project “Embodying Climate Change. Transdisciplinary Research on Urban Overheating” (EmCliC), which studies the experiences of heat and bio-social adaptive strategies to heat in Warsaw and Madrid. The research team includes social anthropologists, statisticians, sociologists, physicists, and climate scientists. As the research is currently ongoing, the paper will mainly reflect on the process of designing a study about climate change adaptation that bridges the divide between natural and social sciences.
The paper will engage with a set of questions related to knowledge construction. How do we converge our own knowledges, connected to various disciplinary fields, and incorporate the knowledges and embodied experiences of vulnerable people, most affected by urban overheating? Can studying people’s adaptive capacities to urban heat become a form of empowerment for them? How to incorporate various scientific perspectives, as well as various actors’ voices, into the design of the study? What is bio-social adaptation from a transdisciplinary perspective? How to connect different scales of adaptation, from individual bodily reactions to political strategic decisions?
The paper will take a closer look at the conceptual work around ‘adaptation’ and methodological exchanges that have been a vital part of our project. It will reflect on the power dynamics and hierarchies of knowledge in climate change research. By examining the role of anthropology and anthropologists, the paper will analyse the opportunities and difficulties of a transdisciplinary approach to climate change adaptation.
Paper short abstract:
The production of climate change knowledge moves between historical determination, present negotiation and future anticipation. These perspectives lead to a conflictual negotiation of climate knowledge between everyday and scientific orders of knowledge, which will be the subject of this article.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. It is firmly anchored in the Anthropocene, and it can be defined as a phenomenon that is reshaping the global world. It has a lasting impact on all social, cultural, economic and political areas of our society. However, society lives in a sharp division between climatology and everyday life. It is primarily abstract scientific findings that contribute to the perception of climate change as a scientific construction based on a complicated and complex interplay of data and mathematical models (Dietzsch 2017, 21; Hastrup 2016, 37). Cultural studies are hardly noticed in this context, at least until the late 2000s. Furthermore, the apparent dichotomy between scientific findings and everyday socio-cultural options for action to contain climate change conflict with each other in the reception of this accumulated knowledge. The global nature and the current scientific negotiation of the phenomenon, the historical logic, as well as the anticipation of future climate developments are socio-cultural aspects that are communicated by the aforementioned abstract scientific findings, but are often far removed from everyday experience and knowledge. This conflictual negotiation of climate knowledge between every day and scientific orders of knowledge is the subject of this paper. Especially the question of how social movements and climate leadership programs take up and negotiate climate knowledge and transfer it to other actors in a professionalized process is a central issue of an ethnography which findings will be presented at the conference.
Paper short abstract:
Although extensive studies on climate change denial were conducted, little or no attention is given to communities that advocate for climate change. As climate change denial may also take an implicit form, such an approach may offer clues into the dynamics of implicit climate change denial.
Paper long abstract:
In present day, the climate change issue acts as a glue for the ideological left-right political views in USA and Western Europe. However, such a model fails to comprehensively explain the case of Eastern Europe where climate change has a reduced political salience, and the left-right political spectrum is not clearly defined. A more appropriate model for the Eastern European climate change controversy is therefore required. Given all these, it would rather be inappropriate to discuss about an explicit climate change controversy in Romania. However, the acceptance of the scientific arguments and the failure to translate it into action is recognized as a form of climate change denial. Therefore, it may be proven fruitful to understand the public discourse of climate change supporters as it may provide clues into the structure of an implicit climate change denial in Romania. As such, this paper presents a content analysis on climate change supporters discourses from a Romanian online community as an attempt to model the implicit climate change denial in this territory.
Paper short abstract:
The paper argues that the nascent discipline of Energy Humanities can help us ‘translate’ natural science knowledge about climate change and energy transition into a more understandable and more accessible narrative by employing techniques from ethnology, folkloristics, and (cultural) anthropology
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the new interdisciplinary area of Energy Humanities, which places emphasis on energy-related aspects of climate change, especially energy transition from the largely fossil fuel-based current system to one based on renewable energy. The energy sector plays a crucial role in global warming as it is the major greenhouse gasses emitter, which is why an energy transition towards carbon-free (or at least neutral) economies of the future is paramount for climate change mitigation. Moreover, Energy Humanities highlights the fact that all aspects of our everyday lives and societies are deeply energy-dependent, so that an energy transition is not just a matter of substituting one form of energy with another, but a complex process with far-reaching social, economic, cultural, and political consequences. Finally, it is interested in the transfer of knowledge and the role the different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences – including ethnology, folkloristics, and (cultural) anthropology have in “translating” scientific facts into narratives accessible to broad public. The paper explores how Energy Humanities can contribute to our better understanding of processes, risks, and possibilities of climate change mitigation. It also invites discussion on the potential of ethnology, folkloristics, and (cultural) anthropology to contribute to the discussion on energy-related matters, and how their tools can be used to broaden our knowledge about energy transition and climate change.
Paper short abstract:
The contribution focuses on the analysis of three Italian case studies: two types of energy communities and a photovoltaic panels purchasing group. We will describe how different the sharing or transmission of technical knowledge is in the strategies put in place for developing each initiative.
Paper long abstract:
The production and reproduction of knowledge relating to climate change are also developed within community-based and grassroots initiatives, that aim at sharing practices and energy consumption, developing forms of changing daily behaviours starting from practice (learning by doing).
Our contribution focuses on the analysis of three Italian case studies: two types of energy communities and a photovoltaic panels purchasing group.
With regard to the selected energy communities, we will describe how different the sharing or transmission of technical knowledge is in the strategies put in place for the creation of each initiative. The first case is a cohousing set up by a group of equal promoters, within which there are also technical skills in the renewable energy sector. In the second case, an NGO develops and implements an experimental model of an energy community that involved disadvantaged people. Around this energy community, people with various skills are provided by the NGO to support the members. In both cases, the goal is increasing awareness about the environmental impact of behaviour and energy consumption through the growth of a shared knowledge.
The third case study is a PV purchasing group strongly focused on building a communication strategy so that knowledge about renewable technologies and their environmental impact is also accessible to a non-technical audience. This allows, in this way, a wider participation in energy issues that are seen by citizens/consumers as a prerogative of experts in the field.
Paper short abstract:
Algae have been washed ashore in Mexico in vast amounts recently. Different actors have adopted different practices and their perspectives and how they think about the algae depends on who has which type of knowledge. Ethnography is well suited to trace what is (not) known about climate change.
Paper long abstract:
Sargasso algae have been washed ashore along Caribbean coastlines in atypical amounts over the past few years. The federal state of Quintana Roo in Mexico is particularly by these environmental changes. Ober 80 % of the local population is dependent in one way or the other on tourism and the algae are threatening the industry as well as the integrity of local marine ecosystems. Different actors have adopted different practices in dealing with the algae, and what is considered the appropriate way of handling Sargasso is contested: While hotel operators and tourism agencies remove algae from the beaches, ecologists and natural scientists have warned of environmental degradation and beach erosion. While the federal government has largely ignored the problem, environmental activists have called for massive investments in research to address the issue. While local workers are employed in beach clean-up teams and have thereby generated new sources of income, tourist demand has decreased at the Riviera Maya. The perspectives these actors have and how they think about Sargasso algae is also dependent on who has which type of knowledge. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I carried out in Mexico, I demonstrate these issues of contestation and the dispersion of knowledge, and how it is distributed unequally. Ethnographic research is particularly suitable in tracing these knowledges in order to discuss what is (not) known about climate change.
Paper short abstract:
Stemming from an ethnography with fishermen this paper proposes to start from the importance of local knowledge and adaptation strategies in small fisheries in order to rethink and discuss Ethnography and Anthropology itself in the face of new theoretical trends.
Paper long abstract:
Fishermen, due to their intense interaction with the natural environment, deeply understand and know nature and its changes. Climate change has had a profound impact on fishing, with repercussions on daily life, both in economic and social matters. The local knowledge of those who tread the seas daily becomes essential to understand the impacts of climate change on seas and oceans and the maritime resources on which fishing communities depend. Through ethnography with fishermen from Setúbal, Portugal, it will be possible to understand the impact of climate change on daily life, its ways of adapting, and the importance of local knowledge for adapting to the various dimensions of this natural phenomenon.
However, in the face of global changes in the Anthropocene, the decline in small-scale fishing in Portugal is visible. It is therefore imperative to reinforce the importance of local knowledge and fishermen for knowledge about the oceans and for adapting and mitigating climate change. In this context, what is the role of ethnography? Facing new theoretical currents that equate the Human as one with nature, how to transform ethnography into something truly holistic? How to study a community without losing sight of the individual? How can Anthropology bring different types of knowledge together in the pursuit of sustainability? These are some of the reflections that will be presented and discussed starting from the ethnographic experience in situ.