Saskia Brill

For decades, climate scientists have been producing data demonstrating that climate change is a real, urgent threat to humanity. Yet this has not translated into political action—or even widespread public concern—at the scale needed to tackle the problem in time. Has climate science failed us? This volume tackles the question of what role—if any—science can play in the future of the climate-change debate. Should science be centered when communicating about climate risks on the ground? Who is able to access and use the knowledge science produces, and to what ends? How does science relate to other ways of knowing the world around us? The pieces in this volume, predominantly by emerging scholars, approach these questions from different angles to ask how we know and experience the climate and, ultimately, how we can transform this knowledge into action.

ABSTRACT How can we understand the relations between economic things and different forms of exchange – commodities, assets, gifts and singularities – in the contemporary economy? The decline of industrial capitalism and the emergence of new types of intangible valuables challenge our understanding of what economic life is about. Analysing economies through one dominant form of exchange risks overlooking the interplay between different types of valuables, their materiality and interactions that form the basis of value creation and exchange. In contrast, this special issue highlights the mutability of things – their capacity to take on and abandon different forms – as a precondition for economic activity. Drawing on a variety of empirical case studies of markets for seeds, grains, fish, carbon emissions and cattle, the contributions set out to trace the social biographies of economic things in, between and beyond multiple economic forms. We argue that it is the very ability of economic things to shift in and out of particular forms of exchange that enables the complex globalised economies of our time.

Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Brill traces the distinction between "Science" as the producer of hegemonic knowledge, and the "sciences" as a multiplicity of disciplines and emplaced practices. Through a discussion of cooperative research with Indigenous Nations in Canada, Brill suggests that successful environmental communication needs to grapple with both of these aspects, which are usually subsumed under the term science—integrating more voices, including nonhuman voices, into the "sciences" can put scientific results on a firmer political footing, yet the authority of Science can act as a lingua franca and be used by non-elite groups to communicate beyond particular settings.

Carbon offsets were designed to be a universal good for a global market, tradable with any form of carbon emission anywhere in the world. This paper shows that emission rights, designed as perfect commodities, do not pass their envisioned markets all too easily. After multiple market failures, producers and traders needed to add something to their offsets that define their value by exceeding the mere storage of carbon in trees or soil: a story. In voluntary markets, stories create a close relation between the good, its context of origin as well as the customer's context. By doing so, they juggle carbon offset through complex entanglements of value creation, modes of exchange, measurement practices and market demand. Carbon credits do not only take on a very singular nature but carry many characteristics of gifts at the same time. This paper thus aims to follow carbon offsets in and between their economic forms: commodities, singularities and gifts. This will be done by closely l...

Diese Studie prasentiert die Vorgehensweise und Ergebnisse einer Befragung der AbsolventInnen des Instituts fur Ethnologie der LMU Munchen, die 2018 durchgefuhrt wurde. Sowohl Bachelor- und Master-, als auch Magister-AbsolventInnen wurden befragt. Ein Ergebnis der Studie ist, dass die Bachelor- und Master-AbsolventInnen ihr Studium in der Tendenz besser beurteilen, als die Magister-AbsolventInnen.

CO2 ist nicht erst mit der Einfuhrung des Emissionsrechtehandels zu einem internationalen Politikum geworden. Seit die Auswirkungen einer zu hohen CO2-Konzentration in der Atmosphare mit dem Klimawandel in Verbindung gebracht wurden, ruckte das Gas in das Zentrum gesellschaftlichen, wissenschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Interesses. CO2 ist nicht nur anerkannter Ausloser fur Naturkatastrophen, sondern seit einigen Jahren auch ein Gut, das auf eigens zu seiner Reduktion geschaffenen Markten gehandelt wird. Diese Arbeit zeigt, wie sich CO2 von einem Gemeingut zu einer Ware gewandelt hat und welches Verstandnis des Menschen von der ihn umgebenen Umwelt dieser Veranderung zugrunde liegt. Die sich daraus ergebenen Verbindungen spielen bei dieser Betrachtung eine zentrale Rolle. Saskia Brill geht somit der Frage nach, wie Kohlenstoffdioxid als sozialer Mittler in einem globalen Handelsnetz agiert. Mit Latours ANT wird das Gas zu einem Akteur, der menschliches Handeln bedingt und daruber ...