Ingmar Lippert

Numbers are ubiquitous. Their numberly guise makes numbers seem trustworthy. Mathematics supposedly governs numbers. However, numbers are always socio-materially performed. A child learns counting with fingers, in the supermarket we do supermarket-maths, rather than highschool or university maths. I wonder: how are numbers done in everyday work practices? And this involves attending to how numbers are destabilised, undone. And what is inside numbers? What happens before, behind, after numbers?

we suggest numbers as sites of the political that precedes numbers’ social effects – social effects that STS and related fields have proven already to be worth of scrutiny. (Lippert and Verran, 2018: 9)

Expanding on my PhD work, I continue to follow the empirically grounded hypothesis that data is not given but made. Etymologically "data" refers to the given (from Latin dare, the given). However data is not given but, rather, made. Data emerges as facts (etymologically, factum, in Latin, something done). Doing data means facts. And fact-making is a central object of STS. I specifically focus on how practices of preparing, configuring and achieving data are entangled with rendering these practices transparent and accountable. My take on practices and abilities of accounting digitally attends simultaneously to how abilities to respond, response-abilities, are configured, enabled and constrained in socio-technical infrastructures.

Metadata and other attempts to translate context into a machine-calculable state lose the situatedness and uncertainties of translating environmental relations into data. [...] datasets are uncertain and not fully specified/specifiable, their reuse and combination increases fuzziness, decreasing controllability; uncertainties are not likely to decrease with Big Data analyses but to multiply (Lippert, 2016: 11)

STS has a strong history in scrutinising other scientific fields' methods and infrastructures of analysis. Despite its reflexivity, too often, STS misses detailing its own material and semiotic practices of analysis, of enacting its own materials and data. STS has politics, not just in discourse but also its ways of doing data and of writing up its research. This project is committed to facilitate developing a methodographic genre - a genre in which we detail the ways and politics of how we, how STS, enacts its own research.

what happens when we turn back and look at our own research practices? In the take-up of ethnography within STS, what kind of performative relations arise between STS and its topics of research? (Lippert and Douglas-Jones, 2019: 35)

Discourses of energy transition require knowing energy. As a social scientist, I am interested in how such knowledge is produced, resulting in an understanding of the specificities and politics of energy knowledges. Energy knowledge is not only shaped in the life worlds of energy consumers and customers, but also in the professional work places of practitioners of energy and environmental governance. Systematising energy knowledge is typically coupled to information infrastructures. Databases about energy generation, consumption abound. What data about energy does not get generated? What data is not processed or simply ignored? Who is taking part in shaping what counts as a kilowatthour?

We note [...] developments around energy poverty metrology in multiple policy contexts [.] Most European contexts lack energy poverty indicators that represent contextualised energy use issues, including energy access and quality, expenditure in relation to income, built environment related aspects and thermal comfort levels. [...] While energy poverty governance relies significantly on data, it does not necessarily become more accountable, transparent or responsible if data choice and processing remain hidden behind the technocratic curtains (Sareen et al, 2020)

Global climate change solutions are dominantly addressed as hinging on changes in industrial and economic relations. Production and services need to be de-carbonised, moving away from the carbon economy. This project addresses ethnographically how corporate carbon accounting, in one of the 50 largest companies on the damaged planet earth, manages to render visible the carbon intensity of the multinational's operations. Positioned between STS, environmental sociology and organisation studies, I analyse how carbon accounting enacts environments and identify patterns of accounted-for-environmental impacts that serve to stabilise the financial core interests, whilst ensuring that the environment does not interfer within the transnational corporation's centre. Internal externalities, indeed.

The real is not singular. Environments. Neither are environments neat nor clear nor ordered. If they are they are so because they are staged as such. Capitalist environmental facts are facts made of documents, databases, humans and their relations. Tangentially, these relations may extend into realities ‘out there’. Primarily, however, capitalist environments are data enactments. (Lippert, 2013: 549)

Environmental management and governance supposedly serve in modern attempts to achieve sustainable development. Universities abound with study programmes in environmental management, resource management and their governance. Conventionally, researchers with a focus on "environmental management" review existing management instruments and improve the latter or develop alternative instruments. My research takes a radically different approach: I approach environmental management as situated practices. By this I refer to the work and labour by agents of ecological modernisation as well as to the historical, geographical and political configuration of their day-to-day work practice. In the foreground of my take on environmental management studies are, then, environmental managers and their instruments and their actual use. These I approach ethnographically, contributing to critical environmental studies, human geography, environmental sociology and an environmental or earthly STS.

it seems apt to reconceptualise environmental management: not in terms of the degree of actual control of so-called nature but in terms of the ways it is played out in relation to other entities, including but not limited to 'natural' entities, social collaborators, accomplices or audiences together with, or vis-a-vis whom, management of environments is performed. (Lippert, 2014: 102)