Research Focus

• Science Studies
• Sociology of Expertise
• Sociology and Politics of Climate Science
• Historical Sociology

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.

Attribution Science as a Technology of Anticipation

Postdoc Project

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.

Engineering the Climate: Science, Politics, and Visions of Control

First Book Project

Notions of the impending climate crisis have pushed a set of highly contested techno-scientific measures onto policy agendas around the world. Suggestions to deliberately alter, to engineer, the Earth's climate have gained political currency in recent years not as a positive vision of techno-scientific innovation, but as a daunting measure of last resort. The controversial status of various so-called climate engineering proposals raises a simple, yet pressing question: How has it has come to this? And, more specifically, how did such contested measures earn their place on policy agendas, despite enormous scientific complexities and fierce political contestation?

This book approaches these questions by re-contextualizing the history of climate engineering within the larger history of political efforts to cultivate climate science for the state. It tells the story of climate engineering as a story of historically shifting alliances between climate science and politics. Drawing on policy records, archival material, and expert interviews, the text follows the turbulent trajectory of what we now refer to as climate engineering through U.S. policy. Instead of essentialising climate engineering, the text demonstrates how historically specific versions of climate engineering have linked scientific to political agendas from the turn of the twentieth century to the teens of the new millennium. This perspective reveals how efforts to deliberately modify and control the climate have always been couched in the political struggles of their time.