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).
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.
