Sustainable Materialism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg ◽  
Luke Craven
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Consumer Responses ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Sustainable Fashion ◽  
Prefigurative Politics

A growing number of environmental groups focus on more sustainable practices in everyday life, from the development of new food systems, to community solar, to more sustainable fashion. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with either purely individualistic and consumer responses or standard political processes and movement tactics, many activists and groups are increasingly focusing on restructuring everyday practices of the circulation of the basic needs of everyday life. This work labels such action sustainable materialism, and examines the political and social motivations of activists and movement groups involved in this growing and expanding practice. The central argument is that these movements are motivated by four key factors: frustration with the lack of accomplishments on broader environmental policies; a desire for environmental and social justice; an active and material resistance to the power of traditional industries; and a form of sustainability that is attentive to the flow of materials through bodies, communities, economies, and environments. In addition to these motivations, these movements demonstrate such material action as political action, in contrast to existing critiques of new materialism as apolitical or post-political. Overall, sustainable materialism is explored as a set of movements with unique qualities, based in collective rather than individual action, a dedication to local and prefigurative politics, and a demand that sustainability be practiced in everyday life—starting with the materials and flows that provide food, power, clothing, and other basic needs.

An Introduction to Sustainable Materialism

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg ◽  
Luke Craven
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Food System ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Sustainable Fashion

Here we introduce the types of food system, community energy, and sustainable fashion movements we will examine in this work, in particular those activists and organizations dedicated to reworking the flows of materials through environments, bodies, and communities. We lay out our reasoning for a focus on activism around everyday life and collective material practices, and detail the participatory methodology of the study. We also lay out the motivations we have found articulated by activists in these movements, including concerns about traditional political processes, justice, power, and sustainability, and describe how we use those as the frameworks for analysis we will apply in the following chapters.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-170
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg ◽  
Luke Craven
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Economic Insecurity ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Sustainable Fashion ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
Local Impacts ◽  
Alternative Practices

We conclude with a discussion of the potential of the sustainable material movements we examine in local food systems, community energy, and sustainable fashion. The focus is on the breadth and diversity of the influence of such movements—from small-scale and local impacts on political engagement and environmental sustainability, to the economic empowerment of local businesses and its impact on economic insecurity, to larger issues of systemic change in production and consumption systems. We discuss both the actual potential, as well as the real critiques and limitations, of sustainable materialist action. And we end with a return to the value of positing possibilities, alternative practices, and prefigurative politics in social movements.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

The Creativity of Everyday Life in Crafting Resilient Food Systems: a Framework and Case from the Atlantic Forest Coast of Brazil

Human Ecology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 601-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain J. Davidson-Hunt ◽  
C. Julían Idrobo ◽  
Katherine L. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Atlantic Forest ◽  
Food Systems

scholarly journals Wood: Embedded Responsiveness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Heterogeneous Material ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Material Behaviour ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Material Practice

Architecture provides the material context in which everyday life unfolds. As a material practice, architecture is constantly in flux, responding dynamically to changes in the surrounding environment. The emergence of New Materialism, stemming from Modernist ideas, marks a shift in architecture from a discourse of symbolism and metaphors, towards one of performance and material behaviour. This thesis studies material performance in the context of wood architecture. Wood is a heterogeneous material with unique performative capacities as a result of its biological makeup. This heterogeneity is often viewed as a disadvantage when compared to more uniform materials that behave more predictably. However, when reconsidered, the unique qualities of wood can be used to inform design. This thesis investigates these qualities with a focus on the material’s responsiveness to moisture. In doing so, it attempts to unravel the potential of wood in the advancement of a new wood architecture.

scholarly journals Wood: Embedded Responsiveness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Heterogeneous Material ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Material Behaviour ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Material Practice

Architecture provides the material context in which everyday life unfolds. As a material practice, architecture is constantly in flux, responding dynamically to changes in the surrounding environment. The emergence of New Materialism, stemming from Modernist ideas, marks a shift in architecture from a discourse of symbolism and metaphors, towards one of performance and material behaviour. This thesis studies material performance in the context of wood architecture. Wood is a heterogeneous material with unique performative capacities as a result of its biological makeup. This heterogeneity is often viewed as a disadvantage when compared to more uniform materials that behave more predictably. However, when reconsidered, the unique qualities of wood can be used to inform design. This thesis investigates these qualities with a focus on the material’s responsiveness to moisture. In doing so, it attempts to unravel the potential of wood in the advancement of a new wood architecture.

scholarly journals Sociology of political conflict

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-51
Author(s):  
Larissa Nikovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political System ◽  
Dynamic Balance ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Horizontal Connections ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Class Divisions

The article deals with the sociological aspects of the analysis of political conflict related to the socio-structural and subjective foundations of political processes and relations. It is shown that many problems and contradictions in the social sphere, such as social polarization, excessive inequality, poverty and violation of the principles of social justice, deprivation of basic needs and interests, unstable labor employment significantly determine the field of politics and are projected on the object and subject of political conflict, weighing down their course and positive outcomes. The insolubility of social problems and contradictions, their encapsulation cause either a decrease in the population's interest in politics, in the effectiveness of democratic institutions, contribute to the widening of the gap between the «private» and «public», generate a sense of political alienation and powerlessness, or push to meet basic needs beyond the existing social norms and political institutions, to destructive forms of resolving political conflicts, which leads to a loss of control of society and social catastrophe. The sociological analysis of conflict interactions based on the predominance of horizontal connections and relationships contributes more to maintaining a dynamic balance in society and realizing the positive potential of political conflict, as it differs in flexible intra-group connections and mobile inter-group barriers in the socio-political system. Excessive class divisions and inequality tend to vertical polarization of society, which strengthens the «discontinuous» lines of interaction between the «top» and «bottom», makes the dichotomy «rule-submission» rigid, and reduces the possibilities of dialogical plasticity and flexibility of the political system.

scholarly journals Wektor poetycki w biografiach artystów: Olga Boznańska, Wojciech Weiss, Jerzy Tchórzewski

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-236
Author(s):  
Aneta Grodecka
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Project Performance ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Common

Starting from the contemporary trends in biography and referring to findings in the field of anthropology of writing and new materialism, the author analyzes poetic forms created in painting studios. She considers the works of O. Boznańska, W. Weiss and T. Tchórzewski as poetic manifestations of the literary practice of everyday life, a type of poeticised documents. The presence of poetry in artists’ lives is multi-faceted: loose pages preserved in a scrapbook, entries in a journal and autonomous works printed in the press, hence their role in creative biography is different. The common ground is a syncretic perception of creativity; the preserved texts co-create a kind of artistic site where the boundaries between the publication, the exhibition and the project performance blur, requiring special editing operations.

Introduction: Border communities: microstudies on everyday life, politics and memory in European Societies from 1945 to the present

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Libora Oates-Indruchová ◽  
Muriel Blaive
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Border Communities ◽  
Imaginary Line ◽  
Stage Process ◽  
Borderland Communities

The 1989/1991 demise of European communist regimes created a powerful impulse for the investigation of memory cultures at Cold War borders and, subsequently, for reflections on the creation of new European border regimes. The four studies included in this special section investigate these two processes on a micro level of their dynamics in new and old borderlands from the perspectives of history, anthropology and political science. At the same time, they explore the relations between the everyday life experience of borderland communities and larger historical and political processes, sometimes going back to the re-drawing of European borders in the aftermath of the First World War.It is the hybrid nature of borders as at the same time separating and connecting (Anzaldúa 1987; Gupta and Fergusson 1997), as the place where “a transition between two worlds is most pronounced” (Van Gennep 1960 paraphrased in Berdahl 1999, 12) that makes them such an attractive and interdisciplinary site of research. It is of interest to geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists (e.g. Donnan and Wilson 1994; Anderson 1997; Ganster et al. 1997; Breysach, Paszek, and Tölle 2003; Wastl-Walter 2010). Daphne Berdahl sees boundaries as “symbols through which states, nations, and localities define themselves. They define at once territorial limits and sociocultural space” (Berdahl 1999, 3). Border research distinguishes between “border,” “bordering,” and “borderland” or “frontier” (the term first defined by Turner 1921). While borders connote a dividing line, borderlands connote an area, and bordering refers to the process of border- and borderland-creation. Borders are established through a three-stage process of allocation, delimitation and demarcation: a territory is first placed (allocated) under the jurisdiction of a government, then an imaginary line is drawn (delimited) on a map, and finally the boundary is marked with physical markers (demarcated) in the terrain (Sahlins 1989, 2). Borderlands or frontier zones are “privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions” (Sahlins 1989, 271), and as such are places where difference is produced and institutionalized through territorial sovereignty, but also constantly renegotiated by multiple actors.

scholarly journals Designing local food systems in everyday life through service design strategies

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (sup1) ◽  
pp. S3079-S3095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Ballantyne-Brodie ◽  
Ida Telalbasic
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Service Design ◽  
Local Food Systems ◽  
Design Strategies
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