Thinking Like a Climate - book launch

UCL Anthropocene and UCL Urban Laboratory are pleased to host a launch of Thinking Like a Climate by Hannah Knox, with responses from Dr Pushpa Arabindoo (UCL Geography and co-director of UCL Urban Laboratory) and Professor Andrew Barry (UCL Geography and co-convenor of UCL Anthropocene).

In her new book, Thinking Like a Climate, Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions.

Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.

Hannah Knox is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCL. Her books include Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (with Penny Harvey) Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World (with Dawn Nafus) and Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change.

Pushpa Arabindoo is Associate Professor in Geography & Urban Design and also a co-director at the UCL Urban Laboratory. Her research entails ethnographic investigations of urban transformations in the Indian city of Chennai where she has been exploring a range of issues from middle-class activism to subaltern politics as they intersect with ecological imaginaries of water, waste and nature.

Andrew Barry is Professor of Human Geography at UCL and co-convenor of UCL Anthropocene. He has previously written on the politics of air quality measurement, the conduct of interdisciplinary research, and the idea of Chemical Geography. His most recent book is Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline. Andrew taught Sociology at Goldsmiths, where he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, and was Professor of Political Geography at Oxford University, before joining UCL in 2013.