Steffen Dalsgaard

The commensurability of carbon: Making value and money of climate change

The introduction of the Kyoto Protocol is an attempt to save the climate through a number of schemes, or mechanisms, that commodify carbon. Among other things, these schemes create monetary incentives to reduce carbon emissions through the trade of permits and credits, and they make carbon an object of financial speculation. Most controversial is apparently the potential of carbon thus to be a universal yardstick for value by commensurating moral spheres of human action (the environment, the economy, development, etc.) that some people regard as distinct. This paper explores the consequences of the speculative aspects of carbon as a standard of value and as potential currency.

The Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life

ABSTRACT New social media have become indispensable to people all over the world as platforms for communication, with Facebook being the most popular. Hence, platforms such as Facebook are also becoming crucial tools for ethnographers because much social life now exists ‘online’. What types of field relations stem from such social media-driven ethnography? And what kinds of data do these relations present to the ethnographer? These questions must be considered in order to understand the challenges Facebook and other social media pose to ethnographic methodology. This article focuses on how Facebook may play an important role even in ethnographic work concerned with questions other than how Facebook works as a social medium. Most importantly it allows the ethnographer to keep up-to-date with the field. I argue that ethnography is already in possession of the methodological tools critically to assess the validity and value of data gathered or produced via Facebook including issues such as authenticity which are also pertinent to digital ethnography.

The field as a temporal entity and the challenges of the contemporary

Anthropological definitions and demarcations of ‘the field’ remain fundamentally anchored in tropes of location and spatiality, and the association between field and fieldworker is still primarily characterised as being maintained by distance in space. This article argues that ‘the field’ must be regarded as much as temporally constituted as it is normally seen as spatial. By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field (e.g. different tempos, paces, extensions and projections of past, future etc.), it is suggested that the spatially anchored notion of multi-sited fieldwork can be complemented and extended with one of multi-temporal ethnography.

Disability as infra-critique: a compositionist approach to the election process in Denmark

ABSTRACT This article investigates how disability can work analytically as a ‘critique from within’. Our case is the accommodation of citizens with disabilities during the voting process in Denmark. Here disability makes explicit how Danish democracy is produced as disability rubs up against implicit, normalized and mundane infrastructures and practices. We investigate disability as critique in this sense of affording a both analytic and practical ‘breakup’. To do so, we promote a ‘compositionist’ post-actor-network theory approach to disability and to polling and investigate what entry-point for critique this offers. We analyze an incident at a polling booth during the 2013 Danish Municipal election. This renders visible some of the complex socio-material processes through which citizens and the Danish state co-enact and co-authorize one another. We highlight how ‘detachments’ are vital to such processes and we examine parts of the historical background for the production of authority in the context of managing disability as exception during polling. In doing so we point out that as the organization of electoral processes evolves, new potentialities for infra-critique also emerge.

Carbon Valuation: Alternatives, Alternations and Lateral Measures?

This article refers to carbon valuation as the practice of ascribing value to, and assessing the value of, actions and objects in terms of carbon emissions. Due to the pervasiveness of carbon emissions in the actions and objects of everyday lives of human beings, the making of carbon offsets and credits offers almost unlimited repertoires of alternatives to be included in contemporary carbon valuation schemes. Consequently, the article unpacks how discussions of carbon valuation are interpreted through different registers of alternatives - as the commensuration and substitution of variants on the one hand, and the confrontational comparison of radical difference on the other. Through the reading of a wide selection of the social science literature on carbon markets and trading, the article argues that the value of carbon emissions itself depends on the construction of alternative, hypothetical scenarios, and that emissions have become both a moral and a virtual measure pitting diverse forms of actualised actions or objects against each other or against corresponding nonactions and non-objects as alternatives.

Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places

ABSTRACT This article discusses how a small place – the polling booth – can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case – a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit influences that computer experts argued would enter the polling booth and challenge the secrecy and the privacy of the vote, the transparency of the electoral process, and thus the electoral enactment of democracy itself. In this way the polling booth potentially works as an ethnographic entry point for following shifts in contemporary debates.

Money, Manipulation and Misunderstanding on Manus Island

ABSTRACT The treatment of asylum seekers at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted much international attention, but there has been little analysis of its local and transnational impact. This article investigates the repercussions for the communities on Manus Island, on domestic affairs in PNG, and on the relationship between PNG and Australia. Overall, it concludes that the costs arising from the money, manipulation and misunderstanding generated by the centre seem likely to outweigh the purported benefits, particularly for Manusians and other ordinary Papua New Guineans.