Description
This is the half-time seminar for Erik Björklund and his PhD Thesis, with the working title: Infrastructures of Climate Contrarianism: A Multilayered Network Analysis of The Swedish Climate Countermovement
Abstract:
The issue of climate contrarianism is not only increasing but changing. Shifting from outright denial to obstruction, it attempts to undermine belief in not only institutions and solutions butscience itself. With each new year setting alarming records of temperatures and extreme weather, time is running out and all hindrances are ill afforded. Information technologies such as smartphones has changed how we try to make sense of the world. Never before have we had access to both so much information, and misinformation. All in the palm of our hand. In Sweden the developments of climate obstruction are made in tandem with the rise of the far-right and the use of new media, particular video content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
The aim of this research project is to analyze the media infrastructures subtending the Swedish Climate Countermovement online. Drawing on a theoretical framework of infrastructuralism this research project approaches this unprecedented access poetically; as a subway system; a network of tubes shuttling you from place to place; both disorienting and enabling; following a set path and yet allowing one to emerge wherever you want. If one considers the online climate contrarian discourse as the surface layer the aim of this thesis is to excavate its technological supporting structures. By digging down to the substructures of the internet it will trace the assemblages of websites, blogs and platform in an effort to understand how information technology functions as infrastructures to support the pseudoscientific epistemology of the climate contrarianism.
