j.schubert@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Julia Schubert is a sociologist working in the field of science studies. Her research explores the relation between science and politics, as well as notions of expertise. She is particularly interested in how scientific efforts to understand environmental issues are intertwined with political efforts to govern such issues. Empirically, she has worked on the history of climate science and policy. In her first book, Julia unpacks how the idea to deliberately engineer the climate gained traction in U.S. climate policy (Mattering Press 2021, matteringpress.org).
Julia holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bonn and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Heidelberg. From 2016–2017, Julia was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Currently, Julia is Junior Fellow at Bielefeld University’s Institute for Advanced Study (ZiF), a member of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network (CSSN), and member of the board of the Section for Science and Technology Studies in the German Sociological Association (DGS). In 2022, she was appointed to the UNESCO World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST).
Project Description
As a postdoctoral researcher with the Fixing Futures RTG, Julia studies the emerging field of extreme-event attribution. Her project explores how this field of attribution science works as a ‘technology of anticipation’, that is, how it conceptualizes and engages with the open and inevitable future of a changing climate. To address this question, the project focuses on the ‘epistemic machinery’ (Knorr-Cetina 1999) of this emerging research field. It is concerned with the methods, models, and protocols, the computers, programs, and organizations that the science of attribution has evolved around. Drawing on the analysis of scientific texts, as well as archival and field research, the project seeks to situate this ‘epistemic machinery’ within the broader trajectory of the climate science field and its relation to the state.