Studies on the Cultures and Politics of Environmental Knowledge

Large scale environmental changes pose significant problems for contemporary societies. The ways in which these problems are given meaning by actors responding to changing conditions is the primary object of analysis in the three articles of this dissertation. They do so by exploring how environmental knowledge is constructed and framed through socially relevant categories such as notions of expertise, science, risk, and resilience. The first article analyzes how an institution with authority over scientific knowledge—the Carnegie Natural History Museum—engages with narratives of the Anthropocene. The Carnegie Museum uses this contested concept to re-imagine the bases for scientific authority in relation to social problems, highlighting how articulations of environmental changes may engender new relationships between scientific and non-scientific communities. The second article explores the role of expertise and expert-public interactions in framing and responding to the problem of sea-level rise in Miami. Miami’s Sea Level Rise Committee becomes a primary setting in which the problem is articulated and acted on. As the committee’s formation relies on notions of expertise to give validity and authority to claims about the problem, (re)constructing and negotiating the rules and norms of expertise becomes a strategy for communities with divergent sensibilities of the problem to re-frame how and why sea-level rise is a problem. The third article illustrates how climate adaptation ideas and strategies travel from Rotterdam to Miami, highlighting the importance of local experiences and meanings in how the paradigm of resilience is operationalized. As the Dutch come to be seen as the global leader in resilience regarding water-related climate risks, their locally-inspired sensibilities of resilience as an adaptive strategy go on to influence Miami’s own implementations of resilience, though contextualized in ways that are specific to Miami’s context. Collectively, the three articles emphasize the importance of local contexts in how environmental problems are given meaning and how this meaning-making relies on socially constructed notions of authority over knowledge