The practice of writing

This piece offers a personal account of how I put Bourdieu’s thinking tools into practice through an investigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, field, and interest, and the practical relation to the world that these tools were designed to interrogate, have helped me disaggregate the IPCC into its constituent parts and then re-assemble it into an analyzable whole. Emerging from this process of constructing a researchable object is an interpretation of the IPCC and its assessment process as a practice of writing. The term practice of writing is employed to characterize the people, pathway, and operations through which the IPCC compiles its assessments of climate change. I also intend to use the term practice of writing as a mode of analysis for exploring how this practice renders climate change practicable for social and political reality.