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AbstractThe cosmopolitan sociology of Ulrich Beck has been widely recognized as making vital contributions to crosscutting conversations on globalization and transnational studies, including these debates that are being played out on the pages of Global Networks. Beck's impassioned critique of 'methodological nationalism' in his own discipline of sociology, in particular, has often served as a springboard for programmatic calls to attend more closely to transnational actors, issues, and processes. However, beyond the occasional acknowledgement, comparatively less attention has been paid so far to the potentialities, specificities, and practicalities of Beck's affirmative alternative vision for the socio‐cultural sciences, that of 'methodological cosmopolitanism'. Building on and extending out from research experiences obtained in Beck's East Asia and Europe‐focused Cosmopolitan Climate Change (Cosmo‐Climate) project, this special theme brings together experts from across a range of socio‐cultural research fields to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanism.

Green Open Access Version (Preprint) Original Version: Bibliothek – Forschung und Praxis 2019; 43(1): 1-10, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/bfp-2019-2020 ; The PARTHENOS project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654119.

This book traces the evolution of climate change research, which, long dominated by the natural sciences, now sees greater involvement with disciplines studying the socio-cultural implications of global warming. While most of social climate change research focuses on how people deal with environmental stresses and possible ways of adaptation, this volume foregrounds the question: What are the theoretical and methodological challenges of investigating climate change in different disciplines? In their Introduction, the editors chart the changing role of the social and cultural sciences in climate change research, delineating different research strands that have emerged over the past few years. Part I of the book explores the prospects and challenges of interdisciplinarity in climate change research, connecting the points of view of a plant ecologist, a historian and a social anthropologist. Parts II and III provide ethnographic insights in a wide range of 'climate cultures' by exploring the social and cultural implications of global warming in particular contexts and communities, stretching from hunter communities in the High Arctic and the Canadian Subarctic over Dutch and Cape Verdian island communities and the metropolitan citizens of Tokyo to pastoralist families in the West African Sahel. Thereby, Parts II and III explore ethnography's potential to produce locally-grounded knowledge about global phenomena, such as climate change. Uniting the different approaches, all authors engage critically with the research subject of climate change itself, reflecting on their own practices of knowledge production and epistemological presuppositions

Cultural Science is a new way of thinking about culture. The book synthesises recent work across different disciplines, setting out a new, evolutionary approach to cultural studies. Engaging with scientific traditions in a way that previous literature has failed to do, it promises to be break new ground in social scientific scholarship.

How We Use Stories and Why That Matters guides the reader through the tangled undergrowth of communication and cultural expression towards a new understanding of the role of group-mediating stories at global and digital scale. It argues that media and networked systems perform and bind group identities, creating bordered fictions within which economic and political activities are made meaningful. Now that computational and global scale, big data, metadata and algorithms rule the roost even in culture, subjectivity and meaning, we need population-scale frameworks to understand individual, micro-scale sense-making practices. To achieve that, we need evolutionary and systems approaches to understand cultural performance and dynamics. The opposing universes of fact (science, knowledge, education) and fiction (entertainment, story and imagination) – so long separated into the contrasting disciplines of natural sciences and the humanities – can now be understood as part of one turbulent sphere of knowledge-production and innovation. Using striking examples and compelling analysis, the book shows what the New York Shakespeare Riots tell us about class struggle, what Death Cab for Cutie tells us about media, what Kate Moss's wedding dress tells us about authorship, and how Westworld and Humans imagine very different futures for Artificial Intelligence: one based on slavery, the other on class. Together, these knowledge stories tell us about how intimate human communication is organised and used to stage organised conflict, to test the 'fighting fitness' of contending groups – provoking new stories, identities and classes along the way.