Common-Sensing: The Politics of In/Visibility in an Age of Planetary Crisis
Talk by Delf Rothe (University of Hamburg)
01. Jul
- 01.07 (Tuesday), 2-4 pm
- Central Campus, C40.530
- Referent: Delf Rothe (University of Hamburg)
- Talk from Centre for Digital Cultures // Climate Future Talk
- Die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch statt
Debates on climate security have long centered on the anticipation and mitigation of future threats, increasingly shaped by speculative scenarios and predictive infrastructures. Today, this governance of climate futures is deeply entangled with digital and visual technologies—satellites, AI-enhanced early warning systems, and digital twins, which seek to simulate planetary processes in real time. Such tools promise more accurate risk management, but they also reconfigure how environmental threats are sensed, interpreted, and governed.
This talk introduces common-sensing as a critical concept to explore the political infrastructures of in/visibility that underpin climate security. Linking Spivak's notion of epistemic violence to recent work on sensing in STS and the environmental humanities, I define common-sensing as a collective practice to register and make sense of environmental transformations—technically, through instruments and platforms, and socially, through narratives and imaginaries. Struggles over climate security are thus also struggles over what is rendered visible, actionable, or excluded.
To establish these arguments, I present examples from my recent work on the European Union's “Digital Twin Earth”, visual imaginaries of geoengineering technologies, as well as the proposal for a “virtual Tuvalu”. While these are examples of new sense-abilities that mobilize digital technologies to render climate risks governable, I end the talk by taking a closer look at the ongoing dismantling of US climate science, disaster protection, and climate adaptation programs. What we are witnessing here is, speaking with Ranciére, a redistribution of the sensible in the governance of climate threats: a political act to destroy public sense-abilities, privatize others (e.g., commercial satellite data), and even manipulate visibility through synthetic media.
Delf Rothe is a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg and a member of the German research cluster of excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Before joining CLICCS, he was the PI of the project “The Knowledge Politics of Security in the Anthropocene” funded by the German Research Foundation (2018-2021). He has published widely on issues including the securitization of climate change, climate-induced migration, security technologies, risk, and resilience. He is the author of Securitizing Global Warming: A Climate of Complexity published with Routledge in 2016.