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Hi, Iâm Janna! I'm a Sociology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. My research interests span organizations, economic sociology, science and technology studies, and climate politics. I broadly research how the institutional, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production shape pathways for organizational action. Specifically, I am fascinated by how quantification regimes around emissions, targets, and climate reporting shape the political economy of the sustainable transition.
My dissertation project examines the organizational politics of corporate climate disclosure, where firms disclose climate metrics including emissions, targets, and risks to investors and securities regulators. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and computational analysis, I investigate how disclosure standards emerged in corporate climate governance and how organizations produce and attach meaning to climate metrics. I first detail how NGOs and the financial sector developed and consolidated voluntary corporate climate disclosure practices before its eventual uptake by securities regulators that increasingly narrowed climate action around risk. I further examine how sustainability professionals within complying companies navigate their organizations to collect, produce, and interpret the required climate metrics, and how these metrics in turn shape organizational routines around sustainability. Finally, I explore the implications of metrics-based climate governance, where the quantification of climate progress through climate disclosure can both enhance organizational legitimacy and substitute formal indicators for substantive climate action.
I aim to bridge scholarship on organizational change, the sociology of quantification, and the political economy of climate change. I am interested in unpacking how climate politics necessarily includes the politics of data. I see applications of my research to many facets of climate governance, including climate reporting, emissions markets, offset markets, supply chain reporting, and sustainable finance.
Other ongoing projects include investigating the social and environmental impacts of data center infrastructure; the construction of financialized nature indicators (with Viet Phan); hiring for sustainability skills in corporations (with Katherine Baird and Adair Morse); the âplatformizationâ of climate governance; and comparative studies on organizational pathways for sustainability and responsible AI (with Angèle Christin and Sanna Ali).
My work has been supported by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. Prior to graduate school, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science with honors in Science, Technology, and Society, and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.
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