Actor-Network Theory

The German National Academic Foundation routinely carries out meetings of junior scholars in the social sciences. The foundation offers competitive scholarships to approximately 0.25 percent of the German university student population.

A member of our group, Ingmar Lippert, will be presenting the latest developments of how he puts actor-network theory (ANT) into practice as part of his analysis.

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The paper explores the material and metaphoric translations of CO2 (Carbon in the general parlance of the regime!) in the technopolitical construction of sustainability in climate change. It is a part of a larger project that explores how the Brundtland Commission's conception of sustainable development as the authoritative guiding principle of economic and social development (Lafferty& Meadowcroft 2000) is mediated through definitions, practices and instruments in the climate change regime.
The emergent form of environmental governance in climate change under the aegis of UNFCCC is subjected to varying contestations particularly on the competence of its instruments in facilitating its underlying objectives _ effective climate change mitigation through carbon offsets and the fostering of sustainable development (Bachram 2004; Byrne and Glover 2000; Christoff 2006; Lövbrand et al. 2007; Oslen 2005; Roberts and Parks 2007; Wara 2007; 2008). While the possible reasons for the shortcomings and the potential solutions to address these identified shortfalls are explored widely, there is a lacuna in the current research on how the regime operationally includes and excludes these concerns despite these being focal objectives. The proposed paper, in its larger context, identifies this as a significant domain of technopolitical process wherein it argues that the regime frames definitions of its institutional objectives, procedures and practices in such a way that actors make sense of the regime through certain ways of translating materialities and practices into a network of interrelations.
Drawing the insights from a discourse analytical perspective, the paper identifies climate change as an emblematic issue (Hajer 1995) in the current environmental discourses, and analyze the dominant discourse in the light of the symmetry of humans and non-humans and the idea of materialities in the Actor Network Theory (ANT). The paper looks into material translation of sustainability in the climate change regime citing the case of carbon. The paper points at carbon (CO2) within the climate change discourses to find that it is not only a chemical compound of a carbon and two oxygen atoms bonded together, it becomes a network through which a set of multivalent relations are mediated. It transforms to be a fungible commodity (MacKenzie 2008), a metaphor, a medium of economic transactions and a material outcome of a set of socionatural relations.

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Questioning the Social Technology "Recycling"

by Ingmar Lippert

A: Introduction to the background and case

• "Julian Berger"
  
• Recycling
  

• Actor-Network Theory - "John Law"
  
• Habitus & Technology - "Pierre Bourdieu" and "Jonathan Sterne"
  
• Revisiting "Recycling"
  

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Contact author if you like to read the dissertation.

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While ecological modernisation has been heavily criticised, a concern for its agents is lacking. By way of conceptualising agents of ecological modernisation through a Bourdieusian take I explore possibilities to bring Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ in a conversation with three other lines of thought: Critical Realist accounts of agents and agency as well as Actor-Network Theory and Haraway’s cyborg metaphor. With them I problematise Bourdieu’s concepts and propose to think of field and habitus as hybrid. Thus, agents act as part of ‘hybrid collectives’. This argument is illustrated by ethnographic data of an agent of ecological modernisation within an organisation: The agent was involved in setting up a recycling scheme. I show how her agency was both enabled and constrained by ‘hybrid fields’ consisting of hybrid entities who/which partially have partial agency. This goes together with recognising the ubiquitous existence of resistance. Both, agents and materials resist and agency is, again, constrained and enabled by ubiquitous resistance. Furthermore, Agents exist within multiple ‘hybrid fields’ and hence they have to organise action vis-à-vis these fields. This organisation of action requires agents to make constrained choices. These constrains exist through both humans and non-humans which, through agency or effect, are part of the factors which shape situations. Then, situations, in both their materiality and their sociality, are shaped by distributed agency as well as effects of entities which do not have agency. Nevertheless, agents have some agency. Therefore I propose a conceptualisation of possible emancipation from (specific) fields. Such emancipation seems necessary for stabilising changes of acting, i.e., changing dispositions.