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Accepted Paper:

Climate change humans & climate change action: worlds of possibility in North American science and activism.  
Adam Fleischmann (McGill University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how mid-range climate change problem solvers produce worlds of possibility for politics and activism, human being and belonging in an era of a changing global climate—and how these worlds challenge and overflow conventional political, technical and conceptual toolkits.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine how mid-range climate change problem solvers produce worlds of possibility. This paper ethnographically approaches the subject of climate change through a reflection on fieldwork among three groups of researchers located in the murky intermediate domain between scientific and managerial knowledge. These researchers are technicians who thrive among the assemblages of people, processes, tools, objects and events through which climate change is made knowable and actionable. Based primarily out of Yale and McGill Universities, their work centers on the realms of ecological economics and governance, climate-economy computer models and climate change communication.

By investigating the practical and conceptual details that make up their engagements with science, technology, policy and the public, I examine how each project produces distinct possibilities for politics and activism, human being and belonging in an era of a changing global climate. Through the conceptions of time, the human, the Earth and human-Earth relations—as well as the material and technical frameworks—that ground their knowledge forms, this paper is a consideration of the assemblages that condition the presence or absence of climate change in North American science and activism.

Following my field collaborators, I ask how their work in boardrooms and classrooms, publications and presentations, calls forth futures premised on new climate change imaginaries. Further, what can the practices of knowledge production from which these imaginaries burst forth reveal about how anthropogenic climate change—and the multiple realities it produces—challenges and overflows conventional political, diplomatic, regulatory, technical and conceptual toolkits? How is climate change remaking political action?

Panel P11
Now you see it, now you don't? Presence and absence of the climate crisis through ethnography
  Session 1