Suchergebnisse

This paper addresses key implications in momentous current global energy choices – both for social science and for society. Energy can be over-used as a lens for viewing social processes. But it is nonetheless of profound importance. Understanding possible 'sustainable energy' transformations requires attention to many tricky issues in social theory: around agency and structure and the interplay of power, contingency and practice. These factors are as much shaping of the knowledges and normativities supposedly driving transformation, as they are shaped by them. So, ideas and hopes about possible pathways for change – as well as notions of 'the transition' itself – can be deeply constituted by incumbent interests. The paper addresses these dynamics by considering contending forms of transformation centring on renewable energy, nuclear power and climate geoengineering. Several challenges are identified for social science. These apply especially where there are aims to help enable more democratic exercise of social agency. They enjoin responsibilities to 'open up' (rather than 'close down'), active political spaces for critical contention over alternative pathways. If due attention is to be given to marginalised interests, then a reflexive view must be taken of transformation. The paper ends with a series of concrete political lessons.

This paper addresses key implications in momentous current global energy choices – both for social science and for society. Energy can be over-used as a lens for viewing social processes. But it is nonetheless of profound importance. Understanding possible 'sustainable energy' transformations requires attention to many tricky issues in social theory: around agency and structure and the interplay of power, contingency and practice. These factors are as much shaping of the knowledges and normativities supposedly driving transformation, as they are shaped by them. So, ideas and hopes about possible pathways for change – as well as notions of 'the transition' itself – can be deeply constituted by incumbent interests. The paper addresses these dynamics by considering contending forms of transformation centring on renewable energy, nuclear power and climate geoengineering. Several challenges are identified for social science. These apply especially where there are aims to help enable more democratic exercise of social agency. They enjoin responsibilities to 'open up' (rather than 'close down'), active political spaces for critical contention over alternative pathways. If due attention is to be given to marginalised interests, then a reflexive view must be taken of transformation. The paper ends with a series of concrete political lessons. ; ESRC

In this article, we articulate an innovative framework, <i>manywheres</i>, and argue that it can advance the work of fostering youth-led change and progressive world-making. We first root psychological and development science in an applied framework of developing more just, harmonious, and tolerant social worlds. Then, we introduce <i>manywheres</i>, a guiding framework of propositions of attending to the complexity and nuance of meaning-making across individuals without becoming lost in nihilism, relativism, or ethnocentric views of social justice. This leads to the construction of a more holistic developmental lens considering the age-related, contextual, and internal factors that shape meaning-making individual trajectories and societal outcomes. <i>Manywheres</i> can thus structure thinking and research with an end goal of understanding the diversity of young people's engagement, activism, and disconnection. We end with mapping a research agenda applying these ideals, incorporating the methodological approaches that can be taken, concrete examples, and implications that can be applied to salient social issues.

Power is a relational dynamic which produces a disparity of effects that cannot be reduced to an exclusive morality, good or bad, or a particular consciousness. It is not something that works according to a single causality, positive or negative. This is not generally acknowledged. Rather in both academic and popular discourse power is primarily thought to be an exclusive possession of a particular subject or social agent with a specific intent. In these discourses, power is dominated by a metaphoric sense of property--something which belongs to the state, government, capital, or technology. Power is thus conceptualised in terms of a possession/dispossession opposition. Discourse about power is preoccupied with identifying its locus and with indicating a particular type of relation which is repressive. This obscures the fact that power is in fact a feature or ontological property of all people in relation to one another, and is active within all interaction and discourse. This thesis refines and develops Foucault's more neglected insights into the peculiar ontology of power, emphasising the central point that power is not the referent for a single relation but is a dynamic active within all relations, both social, interpersonal and even intrapersonal. It can be repressive, enabling, and considered differentially to be negative and/or positive at the same time. One cannot control its effects as it can be inadvertent or unconscious, self-defeating, self-producing, perverse and/or ambiguous. It is therefore composed of an indeterminate efficacy, rather than an intentional will or direction. The common attempt to disassociate oneself from power, to identify it as the property of another, and as producing a single effect of good or evil, I argue, is in itself one of the empirical facts of power at work relationally. The case studies examined in this thesis illustrate the fact that power is the moving substrate of all interests: that of "the revolutionary", "the theorist", "the apathetic" and also "the model citizen". Therefore because all discourses of power produce multiple and indeterminate effects, and because this fact is not recognised, their ontology demands further attention.