Choreographies of Environmental Engagement

Environmental changes, such as plastic pollution, ocean acidification or climate change, are reported to have dramatic effects on the environment we live in and on human and environmental health. Scientists from different disciplines, especially from the environmental sciences, are researching these environmental changes. But how should scientists deal with these changes? What role do politics and activism play in environmental research and what societal position should scientists take? In this project, I investigate how knowledge about environmental change is produced and how researchers engage with ubiquitous environmental changes. The field of marine sciences serves as a case study, as researchers in this field are confronted with drastic environmental changes in their daily work, but at the same also encounter growing public interest, i.e. political and media attention. However, research on how marine scientists engage with environmental changes and what impact this engagement has on their scientific work is largely lacking. Therefore, I ask: how do marine scientists engage with environmental changes in their work, in the stories they tell, but also beyond that, e.g. in public actions? And how does this engagement has an impact on their role in todays society? What boundaries do the researchers draw between different forms of engagement, e.g. between activist and political engagement, and how do they position themselves vis-à-vis traditional notions of the scientific role? In this project, I build on theoretical approaches from the field of Science and Technology Studies, a field that has a strong focus on understanding the contemporary societal role of scientists and on the manifold changes in the relationship between science and society. My focus is on the social, political and epistemic dimensions of marine scientists engagement. Therefore, my work will make an important contribution to the understanding of scientific work and its societal role, an interplay that is in the process of being reconstructed.