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During an unprecedented crisis of bushfires, the staff of emergency management control centers in southeast Australia pause to perform rites with their political leaders. They reenact decisions that have already been made and generate divinations of fiery futures that are unlikely to occur. Their work, like that of others in large centralized technical infrastructures, is made possible by ritualized structures and practices that constitute a double bind. Emergency managers know their performances of control over open systems will inevitably fail to command the world's hazardous surprises. Yet they must maintain these performances, even though they create impossible expectations and forestall self‐critique or desired transformations. Attending to this situation, these sites, and their inhabitants reveals persistent attachments to systems of control in our late‐industrial age and changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas "fracking" industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call "divisible governance." Divisible governance—enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation—not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is both facilitated and regulated. Such governance regimes, we suggest, create felicitous conditions for governments to defer, forestall, or eliminate their accountability while regulating their way further and further into catastrophic climate change. Countering divisible governance begins, we suggest, by mapping the connections that it fragments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Academic disciplines and traditions; engagement; intervention; epistemology; methodologies; methods; politics; power; governance EN Academic disciplines and traditions engagement intervention epistemology methodologies methods politics power governance 969 972 4 10/06/23 20230901 NES 230901 This issue of I Science, Technology, & Human Values i , published a year after the death of Bruno Latour, offers a collection of four articles reflecting on the unfolding legacy of a foundational thinker in our field. Academic disciplines and traditions, engagement, intervention, epistemology, methodologies, methods, politics, power, governance. [Extracted from the article]

Mitigating climate change requires us to constrain combustion in a double sense: decreasing both the use of fossil fuels and the flammability of the biosphere. Fire management by Indigenous peoples in Australia's northern savannas has been presented as a solution to offset the former and assist with the latter, leading to the foundation of a regional economy of projects generating 'premium' carbon credits on Indigenous lands. This article attends to the translational zone – predominantly made up of non‐Indigenous white professionals – that functions to configure the 'right story' of these credits across diverse epistemes and contexts. Following such commodities' interscalar connections, I suggest, helps illustrate the contingencies and contradictions produced by tradeable carbon, as individuals and organizations seek to maintain a niche within a changing climate and shifting global atmospheric relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, non-Indigenous peoples have repeatedly positioned Indigenous peoples as the bearers of redemptive environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to climate change and natural hazards. In southeast Australia, recent widespread interest in Aboriginal peoples' fire management practices has been bolstered by these international trends but more directly driven by a succession of severe bushfire seasons as well as popular accounts suggesting that such practices might "save" the fire-prone nation. This situation is one of both continuity and novelty. While the ways Aboriginal peoples burn landscapes have been previously (re)discovered by bushfire managers and scientists, contemporary Aboriginal "cultural burning" initiatives also represent new contact zones of encounter and recognition, offering paradoxical affordances for individuals and groups able to perform different articulations of Indigeneity. As non-Indigenous people search for Indigenous solutions, in Australia and elsewhere, they raise expectations and fuel emerging tensions, with potentially incendiary results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Submission guidelines tell authors that the journal is "committed to science and technology studies scholarship" but also welcomes work "that extends the purview of STS into new areas."[1] Functioning well, the peer-review process forms a recursive loop where authors and reviewers iteratively revisit and renovate what science and technology studies (STS) was, is, and can be. As part of the infrastructuring of STS, I ST&HV i needs to work with both centrifugal and centripetal forces, publishing both field-defining and field-extending work. We have been in the role of editors of I Science, Technology, & Human Values i ( I ST&HV i ) for a little over six months now. [Extracted from the article]

Unrealistic expectations in society about science reducing and even eliminating the risk of natural hazards contrasts with the chaotic forces of these events, but such expectations persist nonetheless. Risk mitigation practitioners must grapple with them, including in the cycles of blame and inquiry that follow natural hazard events. We present a synthesis of such practitioner experiences from three consequential bushfire and flood risk landscapes in Australia in which science was being used to change policy and/or practice. We show how they chose to work with, counter and recalibrate unrealistic expectations of science, as well as embrace socionatural complexity and a consequential nature. The mismatch between the challenges faced by the sector and the unrealistic expectations of science, generated more stressful work conditions, less effective risk mitigation, and less effective use of research monies. In response, we argue for structural and procedural change to address legacy pathways that automatically privilege science, especially in relation to nature, with broader relevance for other environmental issues. This is not to dismiss or debase science, but to better understand its use and utility, including how facts and values relate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]