Olivia Steiert is a Sociology Ph.D. candidate at The New School for Social Research. Taking a cultural sociological approach to studying climate change, she is interested in textual and visual discourses and how they shape our understanding of climate change as an event. Specifically, Olivia studies the 1.5°C global target for limiting average surface temperature warming, defined as an ambition for global climate governance in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Building on research that shows how the adoption of the target posed various theoretical puzzles, she traces the figure as it travels through the spheres of media, activism, litigation, and into everyday lives. Along this journey, it seems 1.5°C re-signified the term “climate change” to describe an event more present in space and time, foregrounding concerns of justice across the globe as well as across generations. The mechanisms of this resignification may hold some answers to questions about how social groups collectively imagine futures in the Anthropocene. 

During her year as a GIDEST fellow, Olivia will be focusing on the impacts of the 1.5°C figure on media and activism, qualitatively analyzing visual and textual discourses: First, a media initiative with global reach called Covering Climate Now. Launched at Columbia Journalism School in 2019, the initiative aimed “to devise a new playbook for journalism that’s compatible with the 1.5-degree future that scientists say must be achieved. Second, the activist tool of the Climate Clock, a depiction of the carbon budget the world has left to achieve the 1.5°C target in the form of a running countdown. In its first iteration in 2020 the clock was a monument-sized installation on New York City’s Union Square. It subsequently took on a life of its own in do-it-yourself, handheld versions deployed as political statements, mostly as protest signs. Olivia will track the appearances of the Climate Clock and their visual contexts on Instagram, aiming to lay out how these discursive applications of the 1.5°C figure re-defined climate change as an event and a future imagination.

Olivia holds an MA in Sociology from the New School for Social Research as well as BAs in Sociology and Communication Design from Leipzig University and Würzburg University of Applied Sciences respectively.