Climatic Assemblages: Making Climate Knowledge between Technoscience and Ecotheology PhD

Guy Sinclair [PhD year 3]

Supervisors: Lindsay Bremner, Kate Jordan & Victoria Watson

Climatic Assemblages maps the overlaps, contiguities and disjunctions between two modes of making knowledge with climate – through technoscience and ecotheology. The research examines the spaces and worldviews through which climate scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated at national institutes and facilities, and traces its connection to a religious understanding of changing climate. The religious conception of climate change is examined specifically through Jesuit ecotheology that rose to prominence within the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato Si’.

Climate intra-acts between religious and scientific conceptions and practitioners in the milieus of climate knowledge making. I write these intra-actions through four paired ‘doings’ that explore the spatial and material practices of climate scientific and ecotheological knowledges: sensing and responding; contemplating and calculating; conditioning and comforting; and planning and projecting. In these practices, notions of what climate is, how it becomes known and where responsibility for its changes lies coalesce into an ethico-onto-epistemology of climate.

KEY WORDS: climate; technoscience; ecotheology; intra-action