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.