Wikiversity:Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen/Einreichungen/Knowledge Equity as Matter of Democratic Justice in Climate Change Discourses

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Knowledge Equity as Matter of Democratic Justice in Climate Change Discourses Project Description This proposal is concerned with knowledge equity in the context of global warming discourses on social media. Climate change is undisputedely an issue of global concern that can only be succesfully addressed in a common transnational effort. However, the notion of climate justice highlights the fact that historical and current responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions (mainly in the global north) and negative effects (most strongly in the global south) are unequally distributed among different world regions . Against this backdrop, I argue that global knowledge equity, in the sense of a 'just representation of knowledge and people' , in the global warming discourse is of paramount democratic importance. This raises the question whether and under which conditions, civil society actors from countries most affected, are able to make their voice heard and thereby meaningfully participate in international discourses about the issue. In my PhD project I study this question on the Twitter. Here, the ability to get a message across depends on a variety of socio-technical mechanisms that steer attention such as following, retweeting, @mentioning and hashtagging , most of which are publicly observable and can therefore become object of empirical research. In order do so, a dataset of environmental organizations active on Twitter will be compiled and information about their communication environments be obtained from the public Twitter API. The aim of this fellowship is to create this dataset, while streamlining the complete process in the form of a web application, to be published as open source software. The starting point for the dataset will be publicly available baseline databases such as the Environmental Justice Atlas , the list of member organizations of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance and Wikidata entries of environmental organizations that include geographic information. Twitter Accounts for all of the organization names in the aforementioned databases will then be looked up and categorized according to their field of action. The resulting dataset will then be published on github and as a Twitter list, and the aggregated information will be fed back into the baseline databases where possible. Publicly available information about the underlying communication networks of these organizations will then be retrieved from the Twitter API. Although this kind of data collection has become very common, standardized procedures are missing. Therefore, the aim is to build a web application that allows to easily collect this kind of data from the Twitter (REST) API and publish it as open source software. This ensures that my own data collection process does not only fulfill the highest criteria of transparency, but also allows repeatability and reusability for other research purposes. Autor/in Name: Stephan Schlögl Institution: Universität Passau Kontakt: stephan.schloegl@uni-passau.de