“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified pool of staff and collaborators from all over the globe. Climate change is a global issue. He mentions the practical reason that you need people on the ground in and from local communities to understand the socio-political, economic and environmental issues related to his organization’s work on climate. Sure, he finishes, the staff get together twice a year, and they appreciate this face-to-face time, but they really value cutting down on travel. They are a climate change communication and mitigation organization, after all. I nod periodically. Remembering he can’t see me, I grunt or “hmm” at the appropriate times, thoughts racing at these mundane revelations.

Is this what fieldwork in the “murky middle” between political practice and scientific or technical knowledge looks like? I ended my first post this month with a series of questions about how an anthropology of climate change manifests when it explores other venues than the impacts of climate change. In this post I go deeper. What does anthropological research look like not among climate scientists or international policy negotiators, but, rather, with conveners of states and regional governments interested in working on climate change? Or the technicians who provided the data analytics and interactive computer tools for decision support among high-level leaders and middle schoolers alike? Or even the experts that provide the scientifically accurate and public-appropriate messaging for the latest viral piece of climate journalism?

Here, I introduce the shape that this field, and therefore this kind of fieldwork, between climate science and action can take. I also consider where this work takes place and how this milieu forces a change in the shape of research—or at least the shape it has taken during my own ongoing PhD research. This is also an attempt to open up a space for conversations in upcoming posts about the politics and affect (or emotions) of graduate student fieldwork, before leading to ethnographic anecdotes and reflections on the future.

Returning to the opening phone call, at the time I remember thinking that what my interlocutor was saying made perfect sense to me. It was completely reasonable, and perfectly quotidian. But the normality of it was surprising, and a bit disappointing. I became aware that I was hoping for more. I was holding out for a grand organizational philosophy or a complex strategic insight for why he and his colleagues, like so many others in this space, work remotely. Writing down his response in my notebook, I come to this realization. The mundane logic of telecommuting has largely structured my work and emotional life for the last year.

This is because my interlocutor’s organization, a non-governmental organization working on non-national climate action, is not unique in this regard. The murky middle ground of climate change work is made up of a diverse community of actors and techniques. Some are conveners, bringing together sub-national or national and international stakeholders from different states, in the face-to-face venues governments prefer. They often work closely with others who are policy coordinators and analysts, making sure climate policies add up and are consistent with scientific understandings. Others do data analytics or are technology developers, providing the tools and analysis to move knowledge and practice between what are deemed scientific and political realms. Yet others are science communicators, playing the role of translator for the public and leaders.

While most of these actors come from the non-profit world, academics are strewn throughout, collaborating and complementing existing work. Most people play multiple roles and the different types of climate actors often co-exist within the same organization. Yet most of the organizations I’ve followed so far are made up of people spread out across North America.1

They are staffed, if sometimes only partly, by telecommuters, who work remotely together—over conference calls and email. They periodically meet in person. Often these reunions occur at the diplomatic and organizing summits that are the culmination of months of work: this year’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco; the Climate Group’s Climate Week New York City; the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s meetings of scientists, or; the yearly COP (Conference of Parties) meetings of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This is the case at a 10-person U.S. non-profit modeling and communications think tank, as it is at the Canadian branch, consisting of 4 full time staff, of a large international non-profit network, and even some large, international climate NGOs. The exceptions are either the biggest international environmental NGOs or those that have small offices staffed by just a handful, often shared with other environmental or climate groups. A different interlocutor tells me that, in his organization, “the operations/logistics person and the domestic policy person stay home, but the rest of the staff move around a lot because this is what the work demands.”

Anthropologists attempt to let the shape of what they study dictate the shape of their research. In academic speak, this means that we allow our objects of study and their manifestations to provincialize us, as Povinelli (2016) has recently put it. In other words, how we do fieldwork should follow after what we work on. In my case, the structure and logic of how my chosen object of research organizes itself out in the world has inevitably and necessarily changed the shape and methods of my doctoral fieldwork.

I realized early on that if much, but not all, of the work of the organizations working to bridge the gaps between climate change science and climate politics is realized remotely, my fieldwork would have to be follow suit. This has meant conducting interviews and casual conversations over the phone and video chat; sitting in and participating in conference calls and webinars; engaging in fleeting in- person meetings over coffee and between presentations; and travelling to conference and summits, the culmination of months of my field collaborators’ work. Currently in the murky middle of my research on the murky middle, the shape of this research is bound to continue to transform.

Before we dive into the ethnographic detail of a case study later this month, in the next post I explore how “murky” plays out as an affect for this type of fieldworking itself. I muse over the complicated nature–and the potential limits—of conducting first (doctoral) fieldwork like this; I reflect on power, positionality and the ethics of “studying up.”

References

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016 Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke Univ Pr.

1.  Note that, although anthropogenic climate change is a global issue, I’ve focused my PhD research on actors working mainly from North America. This was a strategic and methodological choice. ↩

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann

Early Saturday morning, October 6, 2018, push notifications lit up phones across the eastern half of North America just as the rising sun hit the weekend coast. Messages were coming in from a time zone more than half a day away–from Incheon, South Korea. The 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come to a close. North American climate civil society organizations—never a cohort accused of respecting normal business hours—were writing home in exhausted celebration. The victory being celebrated? The approval of the IPCC’s Special Report on the impacts of 1.5ºC (or 2.7ºF) of global warming.

They were not celebrating the results of the research, per se. The report outlined new and disturbing revelations for the very future of humankind: if we keep on the current trajectory, we will reach a global temperature increase of 1.5ºC much sooner than anticipated, some time between 2030 and 2052. This 1.5ºC warming, the report warned, is more dangerous than we ever knew. An Earth of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels is an Earth of intensified droughts, wildfires and food shortages, inundated coastlines, increased poverty and a likely loss of 70-90% of tropical coral reefs. At 2ºC, we would very likely lose 99% of coral reefs. The situation is more dire than we ever thought, the report read; we have to get our act together now.

So what was good about this news, worthy of writing home about so early on a Saturday morning? In fact, the victory for civil society groups was their successful effort to meaningfully include a powerful and honest description of the impacts of 1.5ºC in the report (specifically in its Summary for Policymakers). Hard-won was the inclusion of the very real human and non-human suffering, ecosystem devastation and biodiversity loss due by around 2040 if we as a species continue living together as we currently do.

And, importantly, the report laid out the scope of efforts needed in order to halt warming below the 1.5º threshold: nothing short of an overhaul of our economic, social and cultural institutions.

~

What role can anthropologists offer as the world warms toward 1.5º?

Considering the stakes of the transformations it demands, anthropologists have had something to say about anthropogenic climate change for some time. In 2015, anthro{dendum} published (under its previous heading) the 21^st issue of its Anthropologies series, the Climate Change Issue. In his introduction, Jeremy Trombley notes how anthropologists have for decades been at “the forefront of studying the ‘human dimensions’ of climate and environmental change,” in all their diverse forms. “Recently,” he continues, “with the release of the AAA [American Anthropological Association] statement on climate change (Fiske et al. 2014), it has become solidified as an important concern” for the entire discipline. As both Trombley and Sean Seary (who provides a review of some representative topics) note, the foremost focus of anthropologists’ work on climate change has been local impacts and adaptations.

Indeed, research in the anthropology of anthropogenic climate change has tended to concentrate its efforts on impacts on threatened communities, their vulnerability and adaptation to, and their resilience in the face of, climate change. Such research has been called “ethnographic climate change response research” (Baer and Singer 2014: 63). Studying the human dimensions of climate change has been instrumental in lifting up the stories of those who have often contributed the least to climate change, but suffer the most from it. This is a trend that will only intensify as we writhe toward 1.5ºC. At the same time this focus has allowed anthropologists to converse in the language of international negotiations and broader environmental change research, all while conducting research predominantly in what have been anthropology’s “traditional” field sites, in indigenous, small rural or otherwise marginal(ized) communities.

For a decade anthropologists have called for heightened focus on climate change and increased involvement in (and research on) natural science climate research (Crate 2008; Jasanoff 2010; Hulme 2011; Fiske 2012; Barnes et al. 2013; Fiske at al. 2014; etc.). Only recently, however, have calls to study the “power brokers” (Lahsen 2008) of climate change—scientists, researchers, journalists, government decision makers and business leaders—taken hold (e.g. Callison 2014; Whitington 2016; Howe and Pandian 2016). These power brokers are “much more important in shaping climate change and associated knowledge and policies than are the marginal populations we are accustomed to studying” (Lahsen 2008:587). Hall and Sanders in their piece for Anthropologies #21 suggest the way forward is “to anthropologise the myriad Euro-American contexts in which climate change knowledge is produced and put to work.”

So what does an anthropology of climate change look like if it moves explicitly outside the important work on impacts, vulnerability, adaptation and resilience? To what part of the massive climate change knowledge-producing apparatus does it look? In fact, anthropologists have turned their gaze to diverse sites. For example, Myanna Lahsen (2002) has looked to Brazilian climate scientists, science administrators and government officials; Candis Callison (2014) has pointed her analysis toward climate change journalists, scientists, denialists, business, religious and indigenous leaders; Jerome Whitington (2016) has considered carbon accounting, markets and trading in Asia, North America, at the UN and with activist groups. My colleague Jonathan Wald has worked with state environmental analysts in Brazil as they strategize and design for unprecedented change.

When it comes to the current state of global environmental change research, “we have developed a fair amount of scientific and technical knowledge on one level,” wrote P.J. Puntenney in 2009. “On another level,” she continued, “we have made real progress in sorting out the application of practical knowledge. It is between these levels, where managerial and scientific knowledge meet…that things are murky” (322). Who inhabits these borderlands? Can anthropology investigate this murky middle space?

This month at anthro{dendum}, I explore these questions and more. I’ll start by looking through the prism of my own research with non-state actors inhabiting the spaces where climate research meets organizing, policy and advocacy work. I examine what can be learned from those working on climate change in the United States in this time of rapid change. I will also ask what these spaces demand of graduate student “first research” and the ethics of “studying up.” The month will wrap up with reflections on the future of anthropological work on climate change. What politics and ethics does climate change demand of the anthropologist and their broader world?

References

Baer, Hans A., and Merrill Singer, eds. 2014 The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Integrated Critical Perspective. 1st ed. Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group/Earthscan from Routledge.

Barnes, Jessica, Michael Dove, Myanna Lahsen, et al. 2013 Contribution of Anthropology to the Study of Climate Change. Nature Climate Change 3(6): 541–544.

Callison, Candis. 2014 How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Experimental Futures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Crate, Susan A. 2008 Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change. Current Anthropology 49(4): 569–595.

Fiske, Shirley J. 2012 Global Climate Change from the Bottom up. In Applying Anthropology in the Global Village. Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler, and Jacqueline Copeland-Carlston, eds. Pp. 143–172. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Fiske, S.J., Crate, S.A., Crumley, C.L., Galvin, K., Lazrus, H., Lucero, L. Oliver- Smith, A., Orlove, B., Strauss, S., Wilk, R. 2014 Changing the Atmosphere: Anthropology and Climate Change. Final report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.

Howe, Cyemene, and Anand Pandian, eds. 2016 “Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Website. Cultural Anthropology. Theorizing the Contemporary,. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/788-introduction-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen, accessed July 17, 2016.

Hulme, Mike. 2011 Meet the Humanities. Nature Climate Change 1(4): 177–179.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2010 A New Climate for Society. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 233–253.

Lahsen, Myanna. 2002 Brazilian Climate Epistemers’ Multiple Epistemes: An Exploration of Shared Meaning, Diverse Identities and Geopolitics in Global Change Science. Discussion Paper – 2002-01 presented at the Environment and Natural Resources Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, January. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/2792/brazilian_climate_epistemers_multiple_epistemes.html.
2008 Commentary on “Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Glocal Climate Change” by Susan A. Crate. Current Anthropology 49: 587–588.

Puntenney, P.J. 2009 Where Managerial and Scientific Knowledge Meet Sociocultural Systems: Local Realities, Global Responsibilities. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, eds. Pp. 310–325. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Whitington, Jerome. 2016 Carbon as a Metric of the Human. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(1): 46–63.

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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