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WORLD RISK SOCIETY - CLIMATE CHANGE IN A COSMOPOLITICAL VIEW

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Climate change and threatened environments are part of the phenomena associated with globalisation that pose serious challenges to modernity’s routines of problem-solving. Contemporary societies worldwide are confronted with the problem of global environmental change - but not all in the same way.

Whereas Western industrial as well as environmentalist convictions and norms can no longer guide evaluations and decision-making, the means, methods and politics of reflexive cosmopolitan governance required to address the dramatic challenges of climate change are yet to be invented. This is why the use and abuse of nature is becoming even more fiercely contested and a paradigm shift is needed to understand the assemblages of community identities, environmental claims, technology, ecological risk and governance

Keynote Speaker: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anthropologist, Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, researching the vitalization of "contaminated" diversity in both biological and cultural worlds through the environmental and social niches of global supply chain capitalism. Her work pursues problems of scale and the promise of moving back and forth between world-making big stories and ethnographic intimacy.

Her book "Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection" (co-winner of the 2005 Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society) challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, but investigates the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Her new research tackles an even more extensive social-natural landscape through tracking scientific, ecological, and commercial connections involving a high-value forest mushroom across the northern hemisphere.

The title of her lecture will be: "Ordinary Catastrophe"

Discussants: Bruno Latour, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Ulrich Beck

Chair: Cordula Kropp

Literature:

• Latour, B. (2007) Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
• Latour, B. / Weibel, P. (Hrsg.) (2005) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. MIT Press.
• Latour, B. (2001) Das Parlament der Dinge. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
• Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.
• Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2004) Shock and Awe: War on Words. New Pacific Press (co-ed. with B. van Eekelen, J. González, B. Stötzer).
• Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. / Greenough, P. R.(2003) Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and South-east Asia. Orient Longman.
• Nordhaus, T. & Shellenberger, M. (2009) Investieren - nicht regulieren: Vergesst Kyoto. Zeitschrift für Internationale Politik. Mehr...
• Nordhaus, T. / Shellenberger, M. (2007) Break Through. From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possiblity. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
• Nordhaus, T. / Shellenberger, M. (2004) The Death of Environmentalism (with Michael Shellenberger).

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