Authoring Participation

Samsø, Denmark's Renewable Energy Island since 1997, is world renowned for being self-sufficient in renewable energy and for having achieved energy self-sufficiency and CO2 neutrality through successful processes of public participation. In this article I seek to show how these processes of public participation so central to the Renewable Energy Island project can be better understood as instances of material participation motivated first and foremost by a concern for the future of the island as a 'liveable' community; a community in which jobs and institutions are not constantly threatening to disappear. By turning to material participation, a concept inspired by Noortje Marres and Jennifer Gabrys, the efforts put into Samsø’s energy transformation by the islanders are given specificity. While much literature on public participation foregrounds public meetings and other spaces for deliberation and debate, material participation locates participation in everyday practice and work. On Samsø, the islanders’ participation was not an add-on to the project, it was an indispensable resource in itself. Building on extensive fieldwork I analyse how the islanders came to invest their time and resources in the Renewable Energy Island project, highlighting how, by materializing energy in concrete, local projects, energy and climate change-related projects can gain community-strengthening potentialities reaching beyond goals of energy self-sufficiency. 

(De-­)Localising the Climate: The production of uncertain agencies through climate websites

This article introduces a device-centred approach to the concept of climate engagement through a qualitative analysis of two websites: www.klimabevidst.dk and www.mapmyclimate.dk. While klimabevidst.dk represents a down-to-earth take on individual engagement with the climate, providing users with hands-on guides to green home improvements, www.mapmyclimate.dk seeks to increase the user’s awareness of the phenomenon of global climate change by demonstrating how the user’s actions impact the earth’s future. Using conversations with six individuals centred on these green technologies, we investigate how the scaling techniques employed by the websites impact the user’s sense of agency vis-à‐vis the climate. The analysis suggests that scales can indeed be changed or redefined in a way that is conducive to climate engagement

Is Denmark a green entrepreneurial state? Mapping Danish climate politics between civic mobilization and business cooptation

This article is based on digital methods research using the tools Hyphe, Gephi and CorText to map the relations between public Danish actors – from informal civil society groups and NGO’s to business and state actors - and their “matters of concern” (cf. Latour 2004) in the heated political situation around the development of green transition policies following the enactment of the Climate Act in 2019. The Act was, according to the newly elected social democratic government, the “most ambitious Climate Act in the world”. It included such political innovations as the Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change, a group of 99 randomly selected citizens mandated to give recommendations to parliament, and a series of Climate Partnerships, business and industry collaborations tasked with developing recommendations and frameworks for the business community’s engagement in the green transition. The Climate Act was passed after massive popular pressure from the civic climate movement leading up to the election. Despite these efforts and the apparent political will to engage with multiple voices and interests, our network mapping shows that the business community, with an emphasis on “innovative and technological solutions”, were soon to become dominant in the network and align themselves more closely with the political system than the civil society actors were able to with their repeated calls for more radical and political action on climate change

Introduction DASTS 2022 special issue

This STS Encounters special issue is a collection of articles that has been developed from conference papers presented at the bi-yearly Danish Association for Science and Technology studies (DASTS) conference in 2022. The conference was held at the Department of Digital Design and Information studies, Aarhus University and hosted by the STS center at Aarhus University on June 2-3. 2022. The theme of the conference was: 'Living with Ruptures: Repair, Maintenance, and (Re)Construction'.&nbsp