Suchergebnisse

De globale klimaforandringers nye epokale bekymringer udfordrer sociologisk vanetænkning og inviterer til forstærket socialteoretisk engagement. Denne artikel søger at give et selektivt overblik over de måder, hvorpå den sociologiske fagdisciplin gør klimaproblematikken til genstand for teoretisk og empirisk forskning; samt at give et programmatisk og fremadrettet bud på dette arbejdes væsentligste socialteoretiske nybrud. Historisk lokaliseres disse spor i miljøsociologien, og artiklen giver et kort oprids af dette sub-felts vigtigste forskningsprogrammer. Hernæst analyseres det, hvordan "klima" nutidigt mobiliseres som markør for bredere kulturelle transformationer i en række ambitiøse samtidsdiagnostiske projekter. Fokus lægges her på de vidt forskellige, men hver især vidtrækkende, teoriansatser hos Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Slavoj Žižek og Bruno Latour. Mod slutningen af artiklen udpeges fem social-ontologiske akser, langs hvilke klimaforandringerne inviterer til fornyet sociologisk fantasi og fremtidige empiriske studier: Rumlighed (globalitet); tidslighed (fremtidighed); materialitet (økologi); epistemisk grænsedragning (transdisciplinaritet); og offentlighedsformer (klimatisk medborgerskab). Klimaforandringer, konkluderes det håbefuldt, kan vise sig at bidrage "positivt" til sociologien, som katalysator for en genopfindelse af disciplinen i en kosmopolitan, mere-end-social verden.

ENGELSK ABSTRACT:

Anders Blok: A New Climate for Sociology? On Social-Theo-retical Ventures in the Age of Ecology

The epochal concerns of global climate change challenge sociological habits of thought and call for a strengthened social-theoretical engagement. This article seeks to provide a selective overview of how the discipline of sociology turns climate issues into theoretical and empirical research; and it also attempts to offer a programmatic and future-oriented assessment of the main social-theo-retical ruptures conjured in this work. In historical terms, these lines of engagement are located in environmental sociology, and the article provides a brief review of the main research programmes of this sub-field. It then analyzes how "the climate" is presently deployed as marker of wider cultural transformation in a series of ambitious projects of diagnosing the present. It focuses on the wide-ranging, but extensively different, theoretical assertions of Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Slavoj Žižek and Bruno Latour. In the latter part of the article, five socio-ontological axes are pinpointed, along which climate change invite renewed forms of sociological imagination and future empirical research: spatiality (globality); temporality (futurity); materiality (ecology); epistemic boundary-work (trans-disciplinarity); and public-ness (climatic citizenship). In a hopeful vein, the article concludes that climate change may contribute "positively" to sociology, by catalyzing the reinvention of the discipline in a cosmopolitan, more-than-social world.

Key words: Global climate change, environmental sociology, diagnosis of the present, ecologization, cosmopolitization, social-theoretical ruptures.

This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban 'green' cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientific contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Beck's notion of 'cosmopolitization' to bear on recent work around 'urban policy mobilities', I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specific policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and 'best practice' policy transfer among urban professionals—thereby also excluding more 'radically' alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social force within specific urban localities, employing two ethnographic case studies into 'ambitious' low-carbon planning projects in Copenhagen and Kyoto, respectively. In particular, my analysis explores how place-based notions of 'culture' are mobilized in the urban visions of architects and engineers as resources for addressing global environmental risks. These spaces of urban green cosmopolitization, I conclude, emerge at the intersection of professional and vernacular ethico-political attachments, thereby reworking—in often contentious ways—how particular urban materials and spaces can be understood in reference to an emerging moral geography of shared climatic risks.

This article examines some of the difficulties of universalistic science in situations of deep conflict over global nature, using empirical material pertaining to ongoing controversies in the context of Japanese whaling practices. Within global-scale whaling assemblages since the 1970s, science has become a ''post-sovereign'' authority, unable to impose any stable definition of nature on all actors. Instead, across spaces of deep antagonistic differences, anti- and pro-whalers now ontologically enact a multiplicity of mutually irreconcilable versions of whales. Empirically, the article attempts to map out a ''cosmogram'' of Japanese pro-whaling enactments of abundant and ''killable'' whales. Following the political ecology of Bruno Latour, the global-scale situation is conceptualized as one of cosmopolitics, the politics of forging a common world across divergences in nature-cultures. Pointing to tensions inherent in this concept, the article ends by suggesting a move toward ''agonistic cosmopolitics,'' in clarifying the constructive potentials of a Latourian anti-essentialist political ecology.

Why are anti- and pro-whaling coalitions still engaged in morally heated confrontations over whales tracing back to the 1970s? Revisiting the global whaling controversy, this article applies insights from the political sociology of social movements to highlight the importance of the politics of identity embedded in an elite-driven pro-whaling countermovement in Japan. As is well documented, Japan has proven a most difficult context for the emerging "global" anti-whaling norm. Rather than simply reflecting material interests or cultural values, however, this sustained resistance should be approached from a processual and symbolic interactionist perspective as the construction of a pro-whaling moral universe integrated around strong and inflexible claims of collective identity. Empirically, the article analyzes the major discursive master frames constituting this pro-whaling identity. Arguing for the centrality of symbolic-moral framing, it further suggests three competing normative frameworks for making sense of the controversy in the wider context of global environmental norms-in-the-making.

International audience ; Citizen deliberation on technoscientific developments is regularly regarded as a hallmark of Danish democracy, embodied in particular by the Danish Board of Technology. Few empirically guided questions have been raised, however, as to how the Board's democratic projects actually work. Through a case study of the May 2003 Danish consensus conference on environmental economics as a policy tool, the article reflects on the politics of expert authority permeating practices of public participation. Adopting concepts from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the conference is seen as opening up the "black box" of environmental economics, forcing economists into attempted justifications of their shared normative and methodological commitments. The failure of environmental economists to reflect on their social value positions is suggested as key to understanding their less-than-successful defense in the citizen perspective. Further, consensus conferences are viewed alternatively as "expert dissent conferences," serving to disclose a multiplicity of expert commitments. From this perspective, some challenges for democratizing expertise through future exercises in public participation are suggested.