Development Seminar

Dr. Jerome Whitington (National University of Singapore)
Carbon as a metric of the human: an anthropology of climate change by the numbers
Anthropology Colloquium Series
2:00-4:00pm, AP 246, 19 Russell St.

In this talk I describe my on-going research project on climate change, carbon accounting and carbon markets through an anthropology of what Jane Guyer et al have called the inventive frontier of numberwork. By understanding how human-atmosphere exchanges are translated into information, and thereby become subject to creative manipulations, I track an emerging ontology of atmosphere that is linked up with changing status of the human and its capacities for planetary transformation. This approach implies breaking with the literature’s view of numbers as rationalization or as governmentality, to foreground the hopeful, transformative and often speculative investment of people who use numbers to diagnose, intervene in and profit from a complex historical moment. Here I describe the ethnographic process of working with carbon accounting practitioners in Thailand, Beijing and North America and some of the results for an anthropology concerned with the planetary stakes of anthropogenic climate change.

Dr. Jerome Whitington has a joint appointment as a Fellow of Tembusu College and a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Research Fellow in the Science and Technology Studies cluster of the Asia Research Institute. His primary book project The New Earth: Climate Change as a Human Problem, studies emerging regimes to manage the chemical composition of the atmosphere. In particular, it investigates practices of quantification, conventions and technology, such as in carbon accounting, emissions management, carbon markets and other forms of interactive practices with the atmosphere. He formerly held positions at Dartmouth College and the New School University in the United States and lived for six years in Thailand and Laos.

Please register below so we know how much refreshments to prepare and can ensure sufficient space to meet demand.