In 2012, we discuss the topic "How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management", as the Call for Papers coined it, together with twenty scholars. A preparatory session for this workshop has been held in 2011 at the 10th IAS-STS conference at Graz, Austria. For this workshop, we are glad to receive support from Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) and Volkswagen Foundation.
In the first part of this theme we endorse how objects are generated in scholarly and managerial interaction and how they are subsequently managed.
Key questions here: What are the objects of environmental management? How are environmental entities construed as objects in practice as well as theory?
Graph editors are very useful for qualitative research. As part of my ongoing engagement with visualising qualitative relationships between materials and actors during the analysis of ethnographic data, I repeatedly stumbled upon so-called graph editors. These are software programmes used by graph theorists, amongst others. In short, graph editors are able to design layouts of nodes (entities) and edges (relations).
Under the label of ‘performance and imaginaries’ we address a key set of questions for the workshop. Performance is a concept that has been developed to emphasise the particular aspects of the practices that constitute social and ecological forms and processes. Szerszynski et al (2003) summarise that performance suggests practices, often iterative ones that constitute or bring about phenomena that would not exist without this (regular) activity. They continue that this practice always stands in a creative tension with a corresponding script or precedent, which informs that practice, but from which the practice inevitable departs to some extent.
The workshop is structured into three themes:
In the received view, environmental management presupposes plans and ideas: management has objectives, such as reaching a specific point or reaching a dynamic trajectory around a certain state. Two examples should suffer: the former might be the re-introduction of a specific species; or an example for the kind of target might be ensuring a specified continuing yield of resources. In response, critics conceptualise a rationality, mostly imagined as a singular but multi-backgrounded phenomenon - such as The Western, Capitalist and/or Masculine rationality of Rational Control5/6 (and opposed to an Ecological Rationality7/8) - which is heralded by hegemonic players.
Conference: 7th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) 2012, 5-7 July Understanding the Drama of Democracy. Policy Work, Power and Transformation
Panel: Prompters and Curtain-Pullers: Policy advisers in Practice;
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie
Labor: Sozialanthropologische Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung
in the “Aquarium” (107a), Mohrenstr. 41, 10117 Berlin
Ingmar Lippert has been invited by the STS scholars of Humboldt University to present emerging results1 of his PhD on the performative effects of work practices in corporate carbon accounting.
Over the last 90 days, our conceptual papers "Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation" and "Sustaining Waste – Sociological Perspectives on Recycling a Hybrid Object" are among the five most read articles in an environmental management book (published by Springer). As it seems: our papers have been well placed in that outlet.
As part of the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA), this panel discusses the relations between humans and water, and how the precious vitality of water is constituted, negotiated and strategically used.
The general conference theme is "Vital powers and politics: human interactions with living things" and therefore very relevant for critical approaches to environmental management.
