TiP’s assistant professor Ingmar Lippert announced the publication of a special issue on environmental management in the key geography journal Geoforum. Entitled Environmental Management as Situated Practice, the collection of papers contributes to theoretical conversations in the borderlands between Science and Technology Studies (STS), Environmental Anthropology, Environmental Sociology, Critical Management Studies and (More-than-)Human Geography.
With this SI, we bring to the study of environmental management what TiP excels in: jumping into the midst of a technology and analysing its dynamics, tensions and challenges – as they are experienced by the practitioners of the technology.
Environmental management can be considered a material and discursive field, a social and material technology in practice. As such, the SI draws on STS to study how environmental management is performed by its practitioners, humans and non-humans. The editorial’s discussion points on “Environmental Management as Situated Practice” are taken up in contributions that take the reader to a Fortune 50 corporate head quarter in which carbon emission data flows are configured, to the tensions over time between Finnish dam control rooms and local actors, to natural scientists in the Amazonia reflecting about the limits of managing earth under capitalist conditions, to the enrollment of migratory birds all over Europe in contesting the impact of an environmental catastrophe in Spain, to mosquitoes that fight back at the interface of environmental and health management and to scenes of urban interpretations of a Tsunami that challenge the very idea of environments as manageable objects.