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AbstractIn this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the 'circulating reference', I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human‐data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.

Tahani Nadim und Neli Wagner sind Ko-Kurator_innen der Ausstellung 'The Influencing Machine', die vom 01. Dezember 2018 bis zum 20. Januar 2019 in der neuen Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin (nGbK) gezeigt wurde. Begleitend dazu haben sie außerdem den gleichnamigen Reader herausgegeben. Hier wie dort beschäftigen sie sich mit Bots, jenen automatisierten Computerprogrammen, die im Hintergrund digitaler Gesellschaften arbeiten und immer mehr Einfluss auf soziales Handeln, ökonomische Prozesse und politische Debatten nehmen. Im Gespräch mit Anja Breljak und Christian Schwinghammer gehen sie der Entstehung der Ausstellung nach, diskutieren die gesellschaftliche Sprengkraft von Bots, die Macht der Erzählung über Technologie und Künstliche Intelligenz und fragen danach, wie sich fassen lässt, was auf den ersten Blick nicht erfasst werden kann. ; Tahani Nadim and Neli Wagner are co-curators of the exhibition The Influencing Machine, which was shown from December 1, 2018, to January 20, 2019, in the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin (nGbK). Alongside the exhibition, they also published a reader entitled The Influencing Machine. Both the reader and the exhibition investigate the role of bots: the automated computer programs that work in the background of digital societies and increasingly influence social action, economic processes, and political debates. In this conversation with Anja Breljak and Christian Schwinghammer, the curators explore the making of the exhibition and discuss the social power of bots, the role of storytelling about technology, and artificial intelligence, and ask how one can grasp what cannot be grasped at first glance.

The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation.

The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation. ; Science role in international environmental governance. Climate change, biodiversity and air pollution

The Planning Moment elaborates the myriad ways that plans and planning practices pervade recent global history. The books twenty-seven case studies draw attention to the centrality of planning in colonial and postcolonial environments, relationships, and contexts