Guy Sinclair PhD

Climatic Assemblages: Siting architectures of climate knowledge production

Supervisors: Lindsay Bremner, Kate Jordan, Victoria Watson

This research explores climatic knowledge production as enmeshed in an apparatus of relations between technologies, texts, assemblies and spaces, and seeks to map connections, contiguities, complementarities and distinctions between the dominant episteme of climate science and an alternative way of knowing climate through a non-secular worldview – Catholic ecotheology. 

Climate science assembles knowledge across a global infrastructure of sensing, computation and analysis that funnels climate data to a selection of key institutions which, in turn, contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Reports. This process realises a view of planetary climate through a small number of supercomputers, mostly scattered across the Global North. These supercomputing sites simulate planetary climate while depending on a set of highly controlled interior conditions – cooled air and water, carefully calibrated electrical provision and connections to expert scientific labour. By tracing the material-semiotic network that surrounds the supercomputer, the technical, social and cultural modes of Western climate science knowledge production can be explored as situated and processual. 

The connections between Catholic ecotheology after the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato Si’ and climate science are manifold. The scientific consensus on climate change was embraced by the Vatican in this text and enfolded into a view of ‘integral ecology’ or the moral obligations of Christians to practice ‘care for our common home’ of the Earth’s climate. These teachings wholly incorporate climate scientific knowledge and are now being disseminated and practiced within Catholic religious orders as they build, communicate and model lifeways that are consistent with climate care. This doctoral research investigates two sets of scholarly communities (climate scientists and Catholic contemplatives) through the way in which their connected knowledges are produced. This production is shown to be through sited practices, reliant on comparable knowledge infrastructures and socio-material arrangements.