Blogs

The environment needs to be protected. Well, this is what the universal "we" has agreed upon. So, there is an environment. And this environment needs human protectors, human managers. Between 2008 and 2012 I studied environmental managers in a corporation (a multinational Fortune 50 company).1 A key question emerging from this work is: which environment is being protected - or managed? Does more than one, singular, environment exist?

• 1. Lippert, Ingmar. Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions. Augsburg: Augsburg University, Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät, 2013.

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).

• 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;

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.

Jstor, the ISI data-bases, google scholar and the like all are incredibly helpful to actually search for papers and even provide means to save you the tedious work of typing over all the bibliographic details. Depending on the way in which you organise your research, zotero may become an invaluable helper, too - especially as it retrieves details for books from their page at amazon. For, obviously, books hardly ever feature in databases focusing on journal papers.

I will be visiting Lancaster University in its Lent term 2011 to work with Lucy Suchman of the Centre for Science Studies (CSS) and staff of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), including Claire Waterton, to unpick the practices of corporate agents of ecological modernisation involved with carbon accounting.

(updated 31/7/2011)

I am spending two weeks focussing on writing up short accessible articles on two topics:

• Greenwashing: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Green Culture,
• Carbon Dioxiode: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste.

thanks to a neat little office at the Canadian Circumpolar Institute, the institute's lovely staff and the great resources of the U Alberta libraries, writing up my thesis is more fun than I thought. My hope is to get a draft version done before summer vacation, and before going back to Europe...

Finally, after a months of coding, and a couple of weeks of abstracting towards code families and themes, I decided about what to focus on as the core theme of my PhD: the social construction of carbon emissions.

As part of my ongoing STS ethnography, I am trying to narrow down the theme which I a(i)m to analyse in depth.
For analysis, I use TAMS. It's friendly developer, Matthew Weinstein, supported me already several times by implementing some of my requests.