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Experimental Futures
How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.
The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.
The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.
328 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 2014
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About the author
Candis Callison
2 books1 followerCandis Callison is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.
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July 1, 2022
It hasn’t been that long since this book was published, and yet it feels like forever. We’ve been living in fast forward. This book is still relevant.
Some key strengths:
1) Scope. The various angles the author takes on how climate change comes to matter is impressive. From the lived experience of it in the Arctic to evangelical partisanship to corporate collaborations on addressing risk.
2) Connection to literature. This book is well grounded in literature from science and technology studies. It validates a great deal of this literature.
3) Readability. There are times when the book is dense with citations, but generally the descriptions of events and the context in which they happen are easy to follow.
Some critical thoughts:
1) Theoretical pointedness. While the book is well-grounded in STS literature, something seems to be missing. Thinking strictly from a theoretical perspective, is the answer to the “so what?” question really just (sorry if this seems flippant) “it’s complicated.” Vernaculars seem to incorporate much, too much? If so much depends on vernaculars, how do we coordinate or move forward? While it validates literature, I’m not sure how much it adds in terms of theoretical tools.
2) Tying it together. How the concept of “ideology” is used here was a little disappointing. It could have helped to tie this all together. For example, a Zizekian concept of capitalist ideology would have gone a long way to explaining how Ceres is able to pressure companies to respond to climate change risk. The fact remains that no matter how much has been done, the climate crisis alludes our attempts to internalize it. This is a feature of the design.
3) No way forward. I understand the reluctance to make a stand on a way forward. It would seem like “near advocacy” when the proper role of the academic is just to observe, interpret, and report. The question remains, how do we make climate change matter? Yes, attend to vernaculars, but with what in mind? Figure out how people talk about what they desire? What they fear? Who they are? Who and what they care for? I think it’s about how we (as outsiders) can prove that we care.
This book deserves a higher rating. I understand how those who don’t know STS might find it off-putting. Maybe that’s a problem with STS more generally? Relativists doing complex work that take other people’s relativist perspectives seriously — it can be disorienting to those with a fixed or overly loose sense of the world.
Some key strengths:
1) Scope. The various angles the author takes on how climate change comes to matter is impressive. From the lived experience of it in the Arctic to evangelical partisanship to corporate collaborations on addressing risk.
2) Connection to literature. This book is well grounded in literature from science and technology studies. It validates a great deal of this literature.
3) Readability. There are times when the book is dense with citations, but generally the descriptions of events and the context in which they happen are easy to follow.
Some critical thoughts:
1) Theoretical pointedness. While the book is well-grounded in STS literature, something seems to be missing. Thinking strictly from a theoretical perspective, is the answer to the “so what?” question really just (sorry if this seems flippant) “it’s complicated.” Vernaculars seem to incorporate much, too much? If so much depends on vernaculars, how do we coordinate or move forward? While it validates literature, I’m not sure how much it adds in terms of theoretical tools.
2) Tying it together. How the concept of “ideology” is used here was a little disappointing. It could have helped to tie this all together. For example, a Zizekian concept of capitalist ideology would have gone a long way to explaining how Ceres is able to pressure companies to respond to climate change risk. The fact remains that no matter how much has been done, the climate crisis alludes our attempts to internalize it. This is a feature of the design.
3) No way forward. I understand the reluctance to make a stand on a way forward. It would seem like “near advocacy” when the proper role of the academic is just to observe, interpret, and report. The question remains, how do we make climate change matter? Yes, attend to vernaculars, but with what in mind? Figure out how people talk about what they desire? What they fear? Who they are? Who and what they care for? I think it’s about how we (as outsiders) can prove that we care.
This book deserves a higher rating. I understand how those who don’t know STS might find it off-putting. Maybe that’s a problem with STS more generally? Relativists doing complex work that take other people’s relativist perspectives seriously — it can be disorienting to those with a fixed or overly loose sense of the world.
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