Speaker: Nils Markusson # Lancaster University
6th Mar 2017
15:30 - 17:00
Staff room, 6th floor, Crystal Macmillan Building.
In a recent paper (Markusson et al 2017), we argue that existing critiques of technical fixes are unable to explain our simultaneous enamourment and distrust with technical fixes. We re-theorise the notion of technical fixes, drawing on cultural political economy. We analyse the co-evolution of clean fossil promises with political regimes since the 1960s – showing how the promises have been moderately stable due to mis-alignments with the neoliberal regime – and discuss possible future co-evolutionary pathways. We argue that ambivalence towards clean fossil technical fix promises is intelligible, given the inherent instability of their co-evolution with neoliberalism and future political regimes.
Markusson, N. Dahl-Gjefsen, M. Stephens, J. And D.P. Tyfield (2017) The political economy of technical fixes: the (mis)alignment of clean fossil and political regimes, Energy Research and Social Science. 23, p. 1-10. DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2016.11.004
Markusson, N.O., Venturini, T., Laniado, D., Kaltenbrunner, A. (2016) Contrasting medium and genre on Wikipedia to open up the dominating definition and classification of geoengineering, Big Data and Society, 3(2): 1-17. DOI: 10.1177/2053951716666102