A Good Life, In Theory: Thinking and Living with Climate Change - I

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing amount of STS and STS-aligned scholarship has used provocative and conceptually creative ways to address the exceptional challenges posed by global climate change. A number of theoretical orientations have emerged within Anthropocene studies, such as new materialism and Gaia-based approaches, offering sophisticated ways for scholars to think through the implications of climate change for both human and more-than-human life. However, these shifts have also inspired backlash from those who argue that the constant search for new theory obfuscates empirical realities and the politics of responsibility. Particularly in light of the climate crisis, the at-times tenuous and overlapping relationships between theoretical creativity, empirical rigor, and everyday action demand renewed critical attention.

This panel seeks to critically engage these fragile relationships within Anthropocene STS scholarship to illuminate potentials for individual, academic, and political meaning in a warming world. How can scholars hold onto both climate realism and creative conceptualizations of more-than-humans? Does the urgency of global warming demand a more overt level of political engagement in academia? Can we effectively reconcile the conceptual utility of our theoretical methodologies with the pragmatic and embodied risks of ecological justice? Papers will address these multiscalar gaps, reframing potential discrepancies as constructive spaces of possibility for good relations between fellow earthlings.

Session I, “Circular Imaginaries,” features theoretical pathways for situating boundedness, temporality, and subjectivity in the Anthropocene. Papers drawing on land art, critical theory, market-based ecology, and AI climate modeling suggest new understandings of linearity, circularity, and individuation within discourses of growth, decay, and renewal in climate change scholarship.

Chair

• Claire Oliver, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Geomorphic Aesthetics and Thermodynamic Imagination: Reading "Spiral Jetty” in the Anthropocene - benek cincik, The University of Edinburgh

• The Circular Economy as a good life A new way to address climate change or an eco-modernist political project? - Vincenzo Pavone, Consejo Superior Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); Mario Pansera, Bristol University

• Thinking ‘Limits’ and its ‘Translations’ with Michel Serres – A Critical Perspective on Limitarisms in Political Ecology - Lilian Kroth, The University of Cambridge

• Times of Knowledge, Climate and Artificial Intelligence - Govert Valkenburg, NTNU

Session Organizer

• Claire Oliver, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge