PhD Course - Approaches to Value

Organizer(s): Steffen Dalsgaard and Ingmar Lippert

Lecturer(s): Professor Paige West (Columbia), Senior Fellow Patrick Bigger (Lancaster), Associate Professor Daniel Lopes (Lisbon), Associate Professor Steffen Dalsgaard (ITU), Associate Professor Ingmar Lippert (ITU and Berlin). Online participation: Associate Professor Hannah Knox, UCL and Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Oslo.

Date(s) of the course: August 8-9, 2019

Time: 9:00 am Thursday August 8 – 6:00 pm Friday August 9

Room preferences: 3A08

Course description:

The objective of the SOCCAR project is to produce novel understandings of the social and cultural value of carbon emission data. Many people in the global north are aware of climate change and find it important to mitigate its consequences, yet they pursue high-emission lifestyles despite having access to multiple digital means for managing emission data. One way to approach this discrepancy is through debates about ‘value’ (economic vs. moral for example). Understanding contemporary responses to climate change is in this view a question of understanding sociotechnical prioritizations or in other words how different practices, technologies, solutions etc. are ‘valued’. How come some forms of action or behaviour preferred over others? How are ‘values’ built into sociotechnical designs of ‘climate-friendly’ or ‘carbon neutral’ technologies? This workshop is meant to provide the PhD students with a solid foundation in different approaches to questions of what value ‘is’ and what valuation ‘does’ in the intersection of humans and technology that is generated by climate change mitigation. The lecturers are all internationally renowned scholars, who have worked with how human societies and cultures ‘value’ in one way or the other, from inequality and dispossession of ownership (West), the building of markets through the intersection of science and law (Bigger), or new financial and monetary forms (Lopes).

PhD candidates will briefly present their ph.d.-project proposals and how they relate to ideas about ‘value’.

Reading list:

Bigger, P. and M. Robertson 2017. Value is Simple. Valuation is Complex. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 28, 1: 68-77.
Dalsgaard, S. 2019. Tales of Carbon Offsets. Paper for a special issue of Journal of Cultural Economy.
Eriksen, T.H. 2016. Clashing Scales: Understanding Overheating. In Eriksen, T.H. Overheating. London: Pluto Press, pp. 131-156.
Knox, H. 2015. Thinking like a Climate. Distinktion 16, 1: 91-109.
Lippert, I. 2018. On Not Muddling Lunches and Flights. Science & Technology Studies 31, 4: 52-74.
Lopes, D.S. 2013, Metamorphoses of Credit. Economy and Society 41, 1: 26-50.
Robbins, J. 2007. Between Reproduction and Freedom. Ethnos 72, 3: 293-314.
West, P. 2012. Introduction. In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive. Durham: Duke University Press.

Programme:

Day 1:

09:00-10:00 Coffee, welcome and presentation round.
10.00-12:00 Presentations 1 and 2
12:00-13:00 Lunch Break
13:00-15:00 Presentations 3 and 4
15:00-15:30 Wrap up for the day and coffee break
15:30-18:00 Excursion and walk and talk to Cisternerne, Valby.
19:00 Dinner

Day 2:

9:00-10:00 Presentation 5
10:00-10:30 coffee break
10:30-11:30 Presentation 6
11:30 –12:30 Lunch
12:30- 14:30 presentations 7 and 8
14:30-15:00 Wrap up for the day and coffee break
15:00-18:00 Excursion to Nordhavn green energy hub
19:00 Final dinner

Prerequisites: The course is aimed at students working with the DFF-funded project SOCCAR. Other PhD students are welcome, but they need to be aware that the course is specifically aimed at facilitating a good project start for the SOCCAR-students with theories and feedback focused especially on the SOCCAR subprojects. It is thus not meant as a general course.

Exam: Based on presentation and participation in discussions.

Credits: 2

Amount of hours the student is expected to use on the course:

Participation: 16 hours

Preparation (paper writing and reading): 44 hours

How to sign up: Write a mail to sdal@itu.dk.

sdal@itu.dk