Encountering Climate in Models and Materials

Part of the Social Life of Climate Change Seminar Series. 

Dr Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL

In this seminar I will present the main argument of my new book, Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, which came out last month. Based on ethnographic research that looked at attempts to bring climate science to bear on the governance of cities, the talk focuses on the experience of people living and working in Manchester, UK, and their encounters with the ambivalent materiality of climate models. To understand these encounters I suggest 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 I point to the directions that this research is taking me in now, presenting some nascent ideas about how to continue research in climate-thinking and its world-transforming possibilities. 

Please note the Zoom link required to join this seminar is passcode-protected. If you would like access to the seminar please email sociology.media@lse.ac.uk.

This seminar series is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environment, the Department of Sociology and the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.