skelton@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Florian Skelton holds an MA in Political Theory from the University of Frankfurt and the Technical University of Darmstadt, as well as a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Zurich. He is interested in environmental philosophy, science and technology studies, psychoanalysis and the history of political ideas. These interests also led him to spend a semester at the New School for Social Research in New York. As a student research assistant, he worked on a democratic theory project and supported the running of the science communication blog ‘Demokratiekonflikte’. Before joining the Research Training Group ‘Fixing Futures’, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Zurich’s Chair for the History of the Anthropocene and a trainee at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.
Project Description
Climate change evokes visions of both disaster and technological solutions. My research project moves in the space between these two narratives. I explore how the climate technologies being developed today serve as a test case for our future. While none of these technologies are yet operating at a scale relevant to the climate, they are already shaping our political, cultural, and economic visions of “climate futures”. This is evident in the strategies and business models adopted by climate technology developers, who are striving to expand and scale up their operations rapidly. As part of my research, I visit infrastructure projects across Central and Northern Europe, specifically those aimed at capturing, transporting and storing CO2, and observe how they anticipate an economy that removes CO2. I also interview engineers, entrepreneurs and other “architects of climate futures” to understand technology’s role in making “climate futures”. Through this ethnographic approach, I contribute to our understanding that climate technologies are not neutral tools, but rather political means of mediating the relationships between society, nature, and the future.