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.
Many focussed on - what I would call - "the other/second side of global carbon management", i.e. carbon trading and offsetting (using e.g. so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects). See e.g. materials from The Corner House, the video "green gold" and the 2009 article by Donald Mackenzie 1.
My topic for my PhD dissertation will revolve around "the first side of global carbon management", i.e. the actual establishment of carbon emissions by practitioners paid for environmental accounting. Some preliminary reports have/will been given at conferences and workshops; see 2 and 3.
- 1. Mackenzie, Donald. "Making things the same: Gases, emission rights and the politics of carbon markets." Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009): 440-455.
- 2. Lippert, Ingmar. "Dematerialising Earth: Sustaining the society-nature dichotomy as social technology." In Social Technology Workshop., 2009.
- 3. Lippert, Ingmar. "Getting it Right? Control, Climate and the Corporate Construction of Carbon Emissions." In XVII. World Congress of Sociology. Gothenburg, Sweden, 2010.