Planetary scientific knowledge and the reality of the contemporary university

There is a growing concern in science about the Anthropocene, climate change and the state of the planet. At the same time, scientific knowledge relies on computing facilities with growing energy consumption, which add to climate change and negatively affect the state of the planet. The concept of "planetary scientific knowledge" is based on Science & Technology Studies' notion of socio-material knowledge and offers a conceptualisation of scientific knowledge as itself planetary, consisting of extended relations in and through one shared world. While this concept points to the need for new response-abilities in science, these are difficult to realise in contemporary scientific and university realities. The talk reports from ethnographic studies of scientific, data centre, and energy management practices at a German university, and points to how scientific temporality, delegation of agencies, and measurement-based management practices get in the way of the enactment of planetary scientific knowledge.

Estrid Sørensen did her doctoral studies in Copenhagen and Lancaster and taught sociology of technology and anthropology of knowledge and technology at Aarhus University, at the Technical University Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and since 2010 at Ruhr University Bochum, where she is full professor of anthropology of knowledge. Founded in Science & Technology Studies she has done ethnographic – and sometimes speculative – research on the materiality of educational practices, on infrastructures of video game harm, on digital methods and on data infrastructures, particularly scientific data centres. She has co-founded Danish and German STS associations and was the secretary of EASST. Since 2019 she is the head of the RUSTlab – the Ruhr University Science & Technology Studies Lab.