Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change by Hannah Knox (review)

Abstract

W does it mean to study climate change as a material-discursive entity ethnographically? What can anthropology lend to this topic, and what do we as a discipline need to learn from it? In Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, Hannah Knox proposes a methodological as well as theoretical approach to attending ethnographically to the “scale-sliding, time-destroying, knowledge-undoing,” ecosystemic relationality of climate change (268). Drawing on Eduardo Kohn and Gregory Bateson’s applications of Peircean semiotics, Knox considers climate change as a form of thought, a process that manifests as an “ecology of signs” within social practices of numbering, classifying, modeling, and experimenting with how we might live in a climate-changed world. Understanding climate change as a signifying phenomenon, a form in continual negotiation with our representations of its meanings, points to how we might “extend our description of climate change into practices, minds, and activities that ultimately aim to change the climate from within by acting on and in an ecosystem of sign relations” (23). Knox draws upon her fieldwork from 2011 and 2018 in Manchester, England, an exemplary city seeking to position itself as low-carbon and postindustrial, with city politicians, activists, residents, and business people. Her methods resist what could come off as a traditional STS critique of the city’s technopolicial forms of governance. Instead, she asks what it means to attend empirically to where and how climate change emerges, as urban communities in Manchester attempt to respond to it.