I started writing this piece in June. It was during Pride month, amidst JK Rowling’s ongoing public transphobia, and the same time as I was getting occasional news alerts about Trumpian cuts to protections around trans healthcare. It was also amidst some discussion here in Canada about Prof. Kathleen Lowery, a professor whose workload was shifted after complaints about her transphobia. Prof. Sarah Shulist covered a fair amount of the news around Prof. Lowrey here on Anthrodendum, focusing on the words the media and Prof. Lowrey are using to talk about the situation, and Prof. Lowrey’s exceptionally transphobic and TERF-dogwhistle door. I am so grateful for Prof. Shulist’s writing. I’m so grateful for her vocal support. I’m so grateful someone sitting with the semiotics of Prof. Lowrey’s door, because that’s heavy work to do—it can feel Sisyphean, like trying to carry a pile of glass shards, your hands get cut and there’s always more to sift through.

But this isn’t just about Prof. Lowery. Or that being transphobic is far too often couched as “academic freedom” (which imagines “freedom” in unfortunate way and an academic community free of us trans folks, but I digress). I’m not even going to write about how Prof. Lowrey has a “Pro” account on a social network made for trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) (where she did ask if there were other anthropologists, so she could put together “a late-breaking session on radical feminism and academic freedom”). I’m not going to go in-depth into how “gender critical” is a nice way of saying “transphobic”— people like Natalie Wynn1 (known online as Contrapoints) have produced primers about the term “gender critical,” and others can do the work around the semiotics of TERFs. Others like Laurie Penny have written about how TERFs’ intellectual history is rooted in the UK. So, as much as I’d like to patiently explain how Graham Linehan—yes, the man who created or co-created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd—is involved in all of this, I’m going to focus on something else.

I’m in part so grateful for Prof. Schulist’s work because of something that it took me a few years to realize: I’ve never met—let alone, to the best of my knowledge, been in the same room with—anyone with a PhD in Anthropology who is transgender or non-binary. (An aside: If you’re a trans or non-binary person with a PhD in Anthropology, I really would like to meet you!)  In the last few years, I’ve been to at least ten conferences on two continents, in more than five countries. I know several trans people who are currently graduate students, but still–I’ve never met a trans person who holds a PhD in Anthropology. I don’t know of someone who can be what Janet Mock and Laverne Cox call a “possibility model” for me.

I have never thought I was “the first” trans person to (fingers crossed) complete a PhD in Anthropology, but when I began to be more public with my decision to live authentically as myself, I realized how exhausting it can be to be out, but without a local trans anthro community. I am very aware that someone’s transness is more or less visible2, and many people do not come out for personal and/or safety-related reasons. (To be clear, no trans person “owes” it to anyone else to be out.) It just struck me as…odd. Sad. Lonely. So, after realizing that I had not ever met a trans person with a PhD in Anthropology, like a good researcher, I spent a few days trying to find the people I hoped were out there. I found someone: one trans person who holds a PhD in Anthropology.

One person.

Off the top of my head, I can come up with a fairly substantive list of anthropologists who do research “on” us trans people. (Their words, and yes, I flinch every time.) Part of CASCA/AAA last year was held on Transgender Day of Remembrance, and even though the lights outside the conference venue were blue, pink, and white for the day, there was no mention of this by anyone I encountered in the conference, nor did the constant misgendering stop–though I didn’t expect it to. I’ve been misgendered by most scholars I encounter, even if I wear multiple nametags with pronouns and correct them multiple times. Someone affiliated with my department hosted an event this past year for someone linked with trans conversion therapy3. It is also desperately important to point out how intersections of race and privilege affect trans experiences: trans women of color are at significantly higher risk of violence, and given academia’s track record with racism and sexism…it’s not great.

I understand why many trans people leave academia, and as someone who’s seen how research “on” trans people by cis scholars gets lauded, I’m also not surprised that trans people just don’t get hired in higher ed. Given that research keeps affirming what trans people have been saying for years—that using our names and pronouns means we face fewer mental health issues—there are many ways that are easy, simple, and free to make us trans people welcome in academic spaces. Yet, discrimination towards trans people continues, and trans people often have fewer or less explicit legal or university protections than cis people 4. I was a little surprised by Prof. Lowrey’s door, but given that I have been using they/them pronouns for years and am consistently misgendered (and there’s an emeritus prof in my department openly writing about “transgender privilege”)…am I really that surprised?

While I am in Canada now, I am from the US—while I graduated years after she started, I went to the same high school as Leelah Alcorn, a trans teenage girl who killed herself after her parents subjected her to conversion therapy. I have heard too many stories that feel heavy to carry. I’m very privileged in that I am white and I was assigned female at birth (AFAB), so for me, misgendering is usually as bad as things get. I’m included in “womxn’s spaces,” while my assigned male at birth (AMAB) trans friends and colleagues are less warmly welcomed, leading to uneasy feelings about bio-essentialism (and second-wave feminism). But still, my heart hurts for all the trans people who have been harmed this year, when in August, the US surpassed the total number of trans people killed in all of 2019.5 So far this year in the US, we remember: Dustin Parker, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, Yampi Méndez Arocho, Monika Diamond, Lexi “Ebony” Sutton, Johanna Metzger, Serena Angelique Velézquez Ramos, Layla Pelaez Sánchez, Penélope Díaz Ramírez, Nina Pop, Helle Jae O’Regan, Tony McDade, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Riah Milton, Jayne Thompson, Selena Reyes-Hernandez, Brian “Egypt” Powers, Brayla Stone, Merci Mack, Shaki Peters, Bree Black, Summer Taylor, Marily Cazares, Dior H Ova, Queasha D Hardy, Aja Raquell Rhone-Spears, Kee Sam, Aerrion Burnett, Mia Green, Michelle Michellyn Ramos Vargas, Felycya Harris, and those whose names we don’t know—and those trans people who have been killed across the world.

Anyways, all of this is a digression. I was angry and frustrated about a tenured professor deliberately misleading people that she’s still getting money (and a course release) after aggressive transphobia. So, I made a small donation to Taking What We Need—a group in my community that provides financial support to transfeminine people, prioritizing BIPOC—and I felt a little bit better. When I saw academics sharing the Judith Butler New Statesman interview where she discusses TERFs, while not advocating for trans people in their own classrooms, I messaged a non-binary friend a particularly adorable photo of my cat, and remembered that my joy and my sense of self cannot be contingent on scholars waiting for an interview to come out featuring Judith Butler themself6.

So, as the pandemic goes on, and the academic job market gets worse and worse: lift up trans people, celebrate trans joy, build an academy that affirms the humanity of people of all genders. And, maybe I’ll meet that trans person with a PhD in Anthropology someday.

I just hope it’s before I become one myself.

1. To provide the briefest of contexts as to why some might not like my reference, there are many critiques of Natalie Wynn that exist, and those that are not just outright transphobic stem from her inclusion of Buck Angel, a trans man who has been outspoken against non-binary people and some trans people who don’t medically transition to his satisfaction, in a video. I’m citing her work here because I think that this is a really good primer on “gender critical” from a trans woman, but adding this context because I think it demonstrates how different trans people do indeed have different ideas about gender. ↩
2. I’m referring to “passing” here—that is, a transgender person’s ability to pass as cisgender, without notice. This is often an issue of safety, particularly for trans women. ↩
3. Without going into too much detail here, the frequent arguments cited here are that Zucker settled with the clinic he was fired from. This is true, but is true only in so much as he settled because the report was released publicly without notifying him first, and one complaint was withdrawn. As far as I am aware, the settlement was not a statement of wrongful termination. For a longer discussion of the academic literature around trans youth and gender-affirmative care, see Florence Ashley, “Homophobia, conversion therapy, and care models for trans youth: defending the gender-affirmative approach,” Journal of LGBT Youth 17, issue 4 (2020): 361-383. ↩
4. In particular, many universities—including my own—have refused to explicitly state that trans people have the right to be called by their names and have their pronouns used. In my experience and after hearing from other trans scholars who have issue at their own institutions, the most frequently-cited reason to not include pronoun protection is “academic freedom.” I believe that this is an unhelpful framing of the argument, but an academic freedom discussion is for another time—the point here is that other rights have to be mobilized (i.e. broad rules against harassment or “vexatious behavior”) in place of an explicit right to be called by one’s name and pronouns. ↩
5. I say “harmed” here because I believe trans people should be able to thrive, not just survive. Measuring success in terms of fewer people murdered or violently harmed is a low bar. Let’s do better, and aim for lives full of joy. ↩
6. Judith Butler uses singular “they” and “she” pronouns. Given how Butler is often described, I’m not sure if many more senior scholars know this. ↩

Rine

Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Their current research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief, they work towards a more curious (and kind) academy, and they live in Tiotiá:ke/Mooniyaang (Montréal) with their partner and cat.

Their website is here: https://rinevieth.carrd.co/

rinevieth.carrd.co/

Source

My next post will be more text-heavy, but until then: my short meditation on comics.

Rine

Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Their current research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief, they work towards a more curious (and kind) academy, and they live in Tiotiá:ke/Mooniyaang (Montréal) with their partner and cat.

Their website is here: https://rinevieth.carrd.co/

rinevieth.carrd.co/

Source

Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Rine Vieth.

Hello, Anthrodendum readers!

I’m excited to be a guest blogger for Anthrodendum for the next bit. Some of you might know me from Twitter, while others of you might have seen a comic I made about plants, grief, and borders. Others might have seen my writing about disability and fieldwork. I’ve also moved around a lot, completing degrees in the US (Colby), the UK (SOAS and LSE), and now Canada (McGill), so I feel lucky to have crossed paths with brilliant scholars and curious people all over the world. But, most of you haven’t met me before—so I’m very glad to meet for the first time here!

As a brief introduction, I’m a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, and my doctoral research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief. I’m also a non-binary, disabled, foreign (US in Canada) grad student who works for their university’s academic casual labour union—and in my (limited) spare time, I do things like design resources for those wanting to research their own institution. I bring all this up to say that I think a lot about how we actually do the work we do, who we include, and what barriers to participation we can reduce.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about how we do the work we do, graduate student life, and other considerations for a more careful, care-filled academia. I look forward to sharing this space with y’all, and engaging with conversations about how we do the work we do—and imagining other ways of being in the world.

Rine

Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Their current research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief, they work towards a more curious (and kind) academy, and they live in Tiotiá:ke/Mooniyaang (Montréal) with their partner and cat.

Their website is here: https://rinevieth.carrd.co/

rinevieth.carrd.co/

Source

“What does it mean to know climate change?” ask Henderson and Long in a 2015 piece for this site’s Anthropologies #21. Researchers on science education, they ask this question to explore what we can do to ensure “knowledge of climate change” becomes “knowledge for social action.” This is no small task—for educators or anthropologists. It has largely shaped my own research, the preoccupations of those with whom I work and climate politics in North America writ large.

As Henderson and Long duly explain, for at least two decades anthropology, psychology, communications, sociology and related fields have agreed: socio-cultural community values and experiences, not merely information, are what shape people’s perceptions of and actions on climate change. This research dumps an assumption that has pervaded the mainstream discourse: that people who don’t care about or believe in climate change are just lacking information. If only we could inject more scientific knowledge into the public, they would understand and take appropriate action on climate change. This latter, defunct model of communication has been called the information or science deficit model.

∆∆∆

In other words, “Research shows that showing people research doesn’t work.” This is a recent mantra of MIT professor John Sterman (e.g. Climate Interactive 2016). Sterman is a key figure of one of the organizations with whom I’ve done anthropological research in the realm between climate science and politics: US-based non-profit, Climate Interactive (CI).

This past winter and spring, I had the opportunity to work with CI, conducting interviews with the users of their tools from all over the world. The people at Climate Interactive know extremely well that new information about climate change alone doesn’t change people’s minds and hearts. Even before he was CI co-founder and co-director, Drew Jones tells me that he recognized a problem: the climate is a complex system in which cause and effect are distant in time and space. Instead of asking what it means to know climate change, Drew asks: “What are interventions that help people viscerally experience the delayed, distant impacts of their actions in ways that create new possibilities?”

He tells me that the best way he figured out how to do this at meaningful scales is computer simulations, and games built around them. Simulation-based role-playing games “offer the potential to compress time and reality, create experiences without requiring the ‘real thing’” (Ledley et al. 2017). Enter CI’s World Climate role-play simulation.

Designed for three to sixty participants, this United Nations climate negotiations simulation has been run a registered 800 times, with over 35,000 participants in seventy-four countries worldwide (Climate Interactive 2017b), from school children to Obama’s climate-change team. Although it is run similar to a model UN event, World Climate benefits from one major pedagogical and design advantage: CI’s C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) climate policy simulator—a computer model. Deemed an “instant climate model” (Tollefson 2009), combined with their simulation-based exercises it is CI’s biggest innovation, Drew tells me. Compared to the massive supercomputer models of the global climate that take weeks to run, C-ROADS is free, interactive user-friendly and runs online or from any laptop in about one second.

Following my work with CI this last year, and after observing Sterman running the simulation with executive business students at MIT, I was able to participate and observe World Climate in action at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco during the Global Climate Action Summit.

∆∆∆

On the last day of the Summit, I take the California Street Cable Car up the long, steep hill. Jerking all rickety and wooden like an old-fashioned rollercoaster, the car has fewer tourists and more San Francisco locals than I expect. I’m the only one that gets off at Grace Cathedral, my eyes drawn upward. The front-facing rose window of the giant Episcopal church has been cradled on either side by the two halves of an equally giant globe, the brilliance of our blue planet hanging in contrast to the sandy grey of the cathedral’s stone. My eyes track even higher. A bright blue banner of a sky hangs taut over the city, rippled in surreal ridges of opaque white.

The World Climate simulation is being held in an intimate room off the main cathedral. It is facilitated by Reverend Fletcher Harper of the interfaith environmental group, GreenFaith. The group of us, about fifteen or twenty people, range in age from late twenties to sixties and skew toward an educated, white, older, religious demographic. Moved into groups of two to five, with each group representing a country or grouping of countries, we prepare our negotiating approaches based on the provided position briefing. My group, the US, is made up of the three youngest people in the room and a white-haired man named Abe.

For each negotiating round, we move across the room, gather in groups. We make our demands and concessions then joyfully scuttle, whispering, back to our huddle of teammates. After each round, we go back to our groups and record what we’ve negotiated: 1) our intended reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, 2) our monetary contribution to the Green Climate Fund and 3) how much we’ll reduce deforestation and increase afforestation (planting trees). A representative announces the group’s proposals and Fletcher quickly enters the numbers into the instant climate model, C-ROADS. Changes appear in global temperatures, CO2 levels, sea level rise and more. Our goal is under 2ºC warming by 2100.

At first the negotiations are polite, not too urgent, playing into the stereotypes I’d constructed in my head about soft-spoken older religious folks. Soon, though, as participants realize how little their countries’ modest contributions are changing the results in C-ROADS, negotiations get nastier, more urgent. The representative from the European Union, a short haired middle-aged woman in sharp glasses, delivers a tough but impassioned plea for climate action; Chinas makes an articulate and very serious case for the US, EU and Other Developed Countries to contribute more to the Green Climate Fund.

The stakes continue to rise through the third and final round as participants attempt to successfully lower emissions below 2º. Heads huddle, quickly crunch numbers with their teammates, weighing options. Someone makes a plea to people of faith—“diverse faiths!” Someone else negotiates “woman to woman.” People run across the room, making in-game deals outside the parameters of the game—promises for the exchange of technology, contracts for domestically manufactured energy infrastructure. As the timer runs out, delegates negotiate urgent positions “in character,” with their country’s interests in mind, but aiming for the global temperature goal.

By the time the debrief comes around and we step out of our roles as delegates at the UN, everyone’s appealing to Fletcher to have another round. “I wanna get that number down!” the former EU delegate shouts. Heads nod in agreement across the room, faces creased in consternation. Someone formerly from the Chinese delegation says they could see this lasting all day. Participants talk about how they felt empowered or caught up by the role they were playing. Abe’s disappointed, he says, because he was playing to win for the position of the US. We go over what it would have taken to get down to 2º and Fletcher shows us in the model.

∆∆∆

As an embodied, social and affective experience, the World Climate simulation at Grace Cathedral had us participants riled up. People were smiley, angry, stubborn, gleefully ornery and downright upset. A sense of urgency pervaded the room once we realized just what it would take to turn the temperature down. Recent research (led by a CI collaborator and Director of the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative, Juliette Rooney-Varga) indicates that this urgency is part of what makes World Climate so successful. World Climate users experience statistically significant increases in knowledge about climate change, emotional engagement with the issue and an increased desire to learn and do more about climate change—even those with political ideologies linked to climate change denial in the US (Rooney-Varga et al. 2018). As a statistical construct describing participants’ feelings about climate change, gains in urgency were closely related to the desire to learn more and intent to take action; gains in knowledge were not.

World Climate acts as the common idiom for diverse participants’ experience of learning and feeling something so distant from normal human scales. The game is embedded in relations, built through playing a role with others in the compressed time of the in-game reality. For some, it acts as a bridging experience between delayed and distant cause and effect, between climate science and climate politics, between knowledge of something and knowledge for action.

The task Henderson and Long introduce to us–ensuring knowledge of something becomes knowledge for social action–has been a challenge not only for those working on climate change. Public anthropology blogs such as this one aren’t published simply for knowledge’s sake. Last month I asked what role anthropologists can play as the world warms toward 1.5ºC. After playing a role in World Climate in San Francisco, I have no prescriptive, right answers to that provocation. Yet as I walked away from Grace Cathedral, sky hung with the blue halves of our one Planet Earth, I remember wondering: what would it mean if anthropologists played the role not merely of translators, interpreters, advocates or witnesses, but bridges between parts of a whole?

References

Climate Interactive. (2017a). C-ROADS. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/c-roads/

Climate Interactive. (2017b). World Climate Simulation Grows in 2017. Retrieved February 28, 2018, from https://www.climateinteractive.org/blog/world-climate-simulation-grows-in-2017/

Climate Interactive. (2016). John Sterman addresses UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon [Vimeo upload]. United Nations, New York. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/190290108

Ledley, T. S., Rooney-Varga, J., & Niepold, F. (2017). Addressing Climate Change Through Education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.56

Rooney-Varga, J. N., Sterman, J. D., Fracassi, E., Franck, T., Kapmeier, F., Kurker, V., Johnston, E., Jones, A.P., Rath, K. (2018). Combining role-play with interactive simulation to motivate informed climate action: Evidence from the World Climate simulation. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202877

Tollefson, J. (2009). Instant climate model gears up. Nature News, 461(7264), 581–581. https://doi.org/10.1038/461581a

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.

Source

My lower back is sore. There’s a tension that’s rising from the place where my neck meets my scalp, and my eyes feel baggy. I’ve just woken up, am standing in my friends’ apartment. M and F have graciously agreed to host me for umpteenth time in what feels like as many months. It’s not yet 8am. F is in the shower, M is making a weak cup of coffee. M and I are discussing what the hell it is I’m doing with my fieldwork.

Mostly, I’m complaining. 

I slide the couch cushions back into their upright sentinel positions, transforming my temporary bed back into the living room couch. M insists with sympathy that the way I’ve been travelling has to affect the research I’m doing. “Couches, sore backs, breakfast with friends.” She insists there’s also a lot to think about in all of my expressed fieldwork frustrations. All the waiting, the unanswered emails, the phone calls and conference calls, negotiations and navigations, “all the frustrating stuff in your field journal,” she says.

My field journals and my research follow the communities of organizations working in the murky middle ground between climate change science and climate politics. Consistent with their work, my fieldwork has been episodic, partly itinerant and sometimes worked remotely or by telecommuting.

This work has felt fruitful yet fitful at best, disheartening at worst. I’ve frequently asked myself the question in the image that opens this post. Messages in the dark, emails sent across the void—is this really what research looks like, what it feels like? What does it mean, analytically, to sort through this frustration? In the rest of this post, I reflect on fieldwork in this murky space.

~

How is it, one friend asked me during a field trip back to Montreal, to do research on people who work on global climate change from an office with one or two other people? What does it mean to be thinking and working with these people from afar—from a room in my mother’s house, in which I passed years of dreamless nights, slowly growing up as the world grew slowly warmer?

I know I’m not alone in wanting to articulate the ambiguous affect or feelings of my doctoral fieldwork. Questioning, complaining, waiting: in many ways my fieldwork has been similar to the experiences of peers. Unlike researchers in the “hard” sciences, as anthropologists we’re expected to do year-long field research as individuals, away from our support networks. This expectation exists latently despite changing sentiments in the discipline in the last thirty or forty years. Following the model of the wartime exile, Bronislaw Malinowski, we embark on a self-isolationist rite of passage that teaches us to ignore both the social and citational supports that hold us up. In truth, we rely heavily on the support of not only faraway supervisors, but, especially, friends, colleagues and family.

Along the way we unsurprisingly experience some loneliness. We inevitably wallow some in self-doubt about what it is, exactly, we’re studying out here in the field. We question our abilities to accurately capture it, to do it justice, to make it legible or feel-able. We often feel confusion about our own roles among the people we study. For those of us whose topics of study require research at multiple sites, the isolation of the field can settle in hard as we keep moving to follow the object, question or people of our study. For those of us who are differently abled or have chronic health issues, visibly or invisibly, difficulties are compounded. Even those of us pale males, for whom the institutions of our society have largely been built to hold up, experience some degree of these hardships in the field. All of my colleagues have expressed similar feelings over the course of their research.

On the other hand, my experience of fieldwork in the murky middle of climate change science and action has been different than the general experience. My combination of multi-sited, itinerant and remote research has led me into murky affective territory, mixing familial obligations with field observations, hometown blues with fieldwork milieus.

Skype conversations with potential field collaborators conducted from my mother’s house often left my head spinning in a blur of past and future lives. Other parts of fieldwork had me feeling dislocated not in time, but place: interviews or conference calls from temporary rented apartments, back in the city I apparently call home, where my life-in-things lies waiting in storage. At other times fieldwork has felt joyful, exhilarating, but brief: staying with old friends in unfamiliar towns, fleetingly meeting familiar faces in person for the first time after months of remotely working together. There is a lot to think about, too, in all of my fieldwork frustrations about access to the field, a conversation that will be continued in subsequent posts.

These fieldwork feelings have led me to recognize that the flow of this type of fieldwork is murky or less than clear, that it has periods of activity and inactivity, isolation and socialization. It has taught me to accept that access will not often be easy, dozens of emails will remain unread, potential next steps never taken. Thinking about the murky affect of my fieldwork has illuminated the networks of support that I know all of us rely on, despite, or because of, our discipline’s penchant for peddling a fantasy of individualized fieldwork. I’m moved to ask what supports other fieldworkers lean on. Mine have come in the form of friends, family, writing groups, reading groups, medical professionals and tabletop role-playing adventuring parties.

If we want to study certain things, we have to do a certain kind of fieldwork—a consistency between content and form. My fieldwork on those working between climate science and politics has presented some peculiar affective hurdles, and even some bodily hurt. These obstacles can be said to be a shared among most fieldworkers, but are particularly plain to see in institutional, remote, itinerant or multi-sited fieldwork. As first fieldwork projects continue to negotiate the limits of the fieldwork paradigm, how can we ensure that succeeding anthropological generations remain prepared for the cutting edge? Follow the conversation to the next post, as we take a closer look at this fieldwork in action around the edges of a major climate change summit.

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.

Source

“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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