Anders Blok

Experts on public trial: on democratizing expertise through a Danish consensus conference

Citizen deliberation on technoscientific developments is regularly regarded as a hallmark of Danish democracy, embodied in particular by the Danish Board of Technology. Few empirically guided questions have been raised, however, as to how the Board’s democratic projects actually work. Through a case study of the May 2003 Danish consensus conference on environmental economics as a policy tool, the article reflects on the politics of expert authority permeating practices of public participation. Adopting concepts from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the conference is seen as opening up the “black box” of environmental economics, forcing economists into attempted justifications of their shared normative and methodological commitments. The failure of environmental economists to reflect on their social value positions is suggested as key to understanding their less-than-successful defense in the citizen perspective. Further, consensus conferences are viewed alternatively as “expert dissent conferences,” serving to disclose a multiplicity of expert commitments. From this perspective, some challenges for democratizing expertise through future exercises in public participation are suggested.

Topologies of Climate Change: Actor-Network Theory, Relational-Scalar Analytics, and Carbon-Market Overflows

Climate change is quickly becoming a ubiquitous socionatural reality, mediating extremes of sociospatial scale from the bodily to the planetary. Although environmentalism invites us to ‘think globally and act locally’, the meaning of these scalar designations remains ambiguous. This paper explores the topological presuppositions of social theory in the context of global climate change, asking how carbon emissions ‘translate’ into various sociomaterial forms. Staging a meeting between Tim Ingolds phenomenology of globes and spheres and the social topologies of actor-network theory (ANT), the paper advances a ‘relational-scalar’ analytics of spatial practices, technoscience, and power. As technoscience gradually constructs a networked global climate, this ‘grey box’ comes to circulate within fluid social spaces, taking on new shades as it hybridizes knowledges, symbols, and practices. Global climates thus come in multiple interfering versions, and we need to pay attention to both continuities and overflows, as illustrated in the paper by controversies surrounding transnational carbon markets. The relational-scalar analytics of ANT, I contend, are well suited to navigating such shifting terrains, a task central to the intellectual as well as practical challenges raised by the climate crisis.

Contesting Global Norms: Politics of Identity in Japanese Pro-Whaling Countermobilization

Why are anti- and pro-whaling coalitions still engaged in morally heated confrontations over whales tracing back to the 1970s? Revisiting the global whaling controversy, this article applies insights from the political sociology of social movements to highlight the importance of the politics of identity embedded in an elite-driven pro-whaling countermovement in Japan. As is well documented, Japan has proven a most difficult context for the emerging global anti-whaling norm. Rather than simply reflecting material interests or cultural values, however, this sustained resistance should be approached from a processual and symbolic interactionist perspective as the construction of a pro-whaling moral universe integrated around strong and inflexible claims of collective identity. Empirically, the article analyzes the major discursive master frames constituting this pro-whaling identity. Arguing for the centrality of symbolic-moral framing, it further suggests three competing normative frameworks for making sense of the controversy in the wider context of global environmental norms-in-the-making.

War of the Whales: Post-Sovereign Science and Agonistic Cosmopolitics in Japanese-Global Whaling Assemblages

This article examines some of the difficulties of universalistic science in situations of deep conflict over global nature, using empirical material pertaining to ongoing controversies in the context of Japanese whaling practices. Within global-scale whaling assemblages since the 1970s, science has become a ‘‘post-sovereign’’ authority, unable to impose any stable definition of nature on all actors. Instead, across spaces of deep antagonistic differences, anti- and pro-whalers now ontologically enact a multiplicity of mutually irreconcilable versions of whales. Empirically, the article attempts to map out a ‘‘cosmogram’’ of Japanese pro-whaling enactments of abundant and ‘‘killable’’ whales. Following the political ecology of Bruno Latour, the global-scale situation is conceptualized as one of cosmopolitics, the politics of forging a common world across divergences in nature-cultures. Pointing to tensions inherent in this concept, the article ends by suggesting a move toward ‘‘agonistic cosmopolitics,’’ in clarifying the constructive potentials of a Latourian anti-essentialist political ecology.

Unfolding the social: quasi-actants, virtual theory, and the new empiricism of Bruno Latour

An important philosopher and anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour has recently outlined an ambitious programme for a new sociological empiricism, in continuation of his actor-network-theory (ANT). Interrogating issues of description, explanation and theoretical interpretation in this ‘sociology of associations’, we argue that certain internal tensions are manifest. While Latours philosophy of social science demands an absolute abandonment of theory in all its forms, proposing instead to simply ‘go on describing’, he is in practice employing versions of common sense explanation and pragmatic-constructivist theory to make ends meet. The core of this tension, we claim, can be located in Latours meta-theoretical commitments, in effect obscuring important ways in which human subjects employ things, effects and symbols beyond their simple, ‘empirical’ existence. To illustrate these claims, we deploy the example of how morality works in social life, and coin the term quasi-actant, in allusion to the Latourian actant, to better understand such processes. Our overall criticism of ANT is immanent, aiming at the re-introduction of what we dub ‘virtual theory’ into Latourian empiricism, thus further strengthening what remains one of the most promising contemporary attempts to reinvigorate the sociological enterprise.

Greening Cosmopolitan Urbanism? On the Transnational Mobility of Low-Carbon Formats in Northern European and East Asian Cities

This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban ‘green’ cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientific contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Becks notion of ‘cosmopolitization’ to bear on recent work around ‘urban policy mobilities’, I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specific policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and ‘best practice’ policy transfer among urban professionals—thereby also excluding more ‘radically’ alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social force within specific urban localities, employing two ethnographic case studies into ‘ambitious’ low-carbon planning projects in Copenhagen and Kyoto, respectively. In particular, my analysis explores how place-based notions of ‘culture’ are mobilized in the urban visions of architects and engineers as resources for addressing global environmental risks. These spaces of urban green cosmopolitization, I conclude, emerge at the intersection of professional and vernacular ethico-political attachments, thereby reworking—in often contentious ways—how particular urban materials and spaces can be understood in reference to an emerging moral geography of shared climatic risks.

Pragmatic sociology as political ecology On the many worths of nature(s)

This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel ‘green’ order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that – when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond – pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature’s worth in political modernity.

Mode-2 social science knowledge production? The case of Danish sociology between institutional crisis and new welfare stabilizations

The notion of mode-2 knowledge production points to far-reaching transformations in science-society relations, but few attempts have been made to investigate what growing economic and political demands on research may entail for the social sciences. This case study of new patterns of social science knowledge production outlines some major institutional and cognitive changes in Danish academic sociology during ‘mode-2’ times, from the 1980s onwards. Empirically, we rely on documentary sources and qualitative interviews with Danish sociologists, aiming to reconstruct institutional trajectories expressive of wider changes in the field. The analysis shows this has been a period of exceptional volatility in Danish sociology, from institutional crisis in the 1980s to a gradual re-expansion since the 1990s. Drawing on a four-fold typology of professional, critical, public, and policy sociologies, we show how a particular cognitive modality of sociology — ‘welfare reflexivity’ — has become a dominant form of Danish sociological knowledge production. Welfare reflexivity has proven a viable response to volatile mode-2 policy conditions. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Mapping the Super‐Whale: Towards a Mobile Ethnography of Situated Globalities

Abstract In empirical discussion on global connections, frequent allusions are made to Michael Burawoy’s ‘global’ and George Marcus’ ‘multi‐sited’ ethnographies. While both have inspired transnational fieldwork, neither methodological approach has sufficiently analysed the local‐global dichotomy embedded at their core. Drawing on actor‐network theory (ANT), this article suggests an alternative framework for mobile ethnography, better suited to a social world conceived in network‐relational terms. Employing metaphors of mobility, scale‐making, and cartography, an empirically driven approach to situated and plural ‘globalities’ is outlined. These claims are developed drawing on the author’s inquiries into Japanese whaling practices, showing how ‘ethno‐socio‐cartography’ can contribute to the mapping of global‐scale micro‐cosmoses.

Picturing Urban Green Attachments: Civic Activists Moving between Familiar and Public Engagements in the City

In this article, we explore the cultural-political tensions and ambiguities of urban ecology, by way of following how activists move and translate between ‘familiar’ and ‘public’ engagements in the green city. Empirically, we locate our exploration in and around Nordhavnen (The North Harbor), a large-scale sustainable urban development project in Copenhagen. Invoking Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology of ‘regimes of engagement’, we sketch a culturally sensitive approach to urban ecological activism, highlighting the critical moral capacities involved in building new forms of ‘commonality in the plural’ in the city. In particular, we stress the role assumed in such engagements by various image-making practices, as means for activists to express, share and render publicly visible a range of embodied urban attachments. Pragmatic sociology, we conclude, may contribute to a novel understanding of urban politics as inclusive learning processes, more hospitable to a wider diversity of familiar attachments to cities and their ecologies.