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.

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.

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.

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.

Cultural Studies in Japan

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 305-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoko Tamari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Actual Knowledge ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cultural Movement

This interview focuses on the history and current developments of cultural studies in Japan. Shunya Yoshimi is one of the leading figures in cultural studies in Japan since its introduction in the mid-1990s. He is currently engaged in the task of developing cultural studies in Asia with younger generations of scholars and to this end has helped established a new type of cultural movement, Cultural Typhoon, as well as contributing to expand Asian cultural studies networks, such as Inter Asia Cultural Studies. He argues that cultural studies has been questioning the relationship between meaning and power in everyday life through a variety of concrete and practical fields. In fact, he argues, it is inevitable for cultural studies to ask questions about the politics, if we in cultural studies are to develop actual knowledge of cultural production and consumption today. Hence, it is essential to investigate the micro-politics of bodies in relation to macro-political processes. In the case of Japan, working on cultural studies within an existing discipline also means engaging in experiments, which ultimately could have the potential to undermine existing disciplines from within.

scholarly journals Father Porphyry Stupnytsky (1847–1926): touches to the portrait

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-205
Author(s):  
Ruslan Deliatynskyi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Methodological Approaches

The relevance of the study lies in the attempt to reconstruct the historical portrait of a Greek Catholic priest against the background of socio-political processes in Galicia in the late nineteenth - in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The appeal to the figure of the next pastor, who continues a series of our studies of the biographies of the clergy of the Stanislaviv eparchy, is conditioned by the need to form objective assessments of the historical development of the Greek Catholic Church based on the analysis of sources and the application of new methodological approaches, in particular, biography and "history of everyday life". The assessments of the role of the Greek Catholic clergy in the formation of the national identity of Ukrainians in Galicia in modern Ukrainian historiography, the thesis about the clergy as a "smithy of intellectuals", obviously need a new understanding of specific examples.

Unsolved problems in hydrology: societal responses to unprecedented events

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Rusca ◽  
Giuliano Di Baldassarre ◽  
Gabriele Messori
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Flood Events ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hydrological Extremes ◽  
Future Space ◽  
Sustainable Fashion ◽  
Conceptual Transfer ◽  
The Relationship

<p>Understanding how different societal groups respond to drought or flood events is one of the unsolved problems in hydrology (UPH), concerning the interfaces with society. More specifically, there is a need to decipher the relationship between potential impacts of unprecedented events, distribution of sociohydrological risk as well as future adaptation and recovery trajectories. In this presentation, we introduce a new analytical approach to answer the question of how contemporary societies might adapt to and recover from unprecedented drought and flood events in an inclusive and sustainable fashion. In doing so, this presentation deepens our understandings of the interface between hydrological extremes and society. Addressing this question requires creating new forms of knowledge that integrate analyses of the past, i.e. historical and political processes of risk and adaptation and the underlying power relations, with hydroclimatic projections of unprecedented events. We thus combine three aspects which have been studied individually, but never integrated: a. scenarios based on social science theories on disaster management; b. case studies of past hydroclimatic events which were unprecedented at the time of their occurrence; c. conceptual transfer across case studies - that is, learning something about potential future unprecedented events at one location by leveraging events which occurred elsewhere. Some of the scenarios developed may already be emerging in current times, whilst others are plausible hypotheses in humanity’s future space. This approach, at the nexus between social and hydrological sciences, has the concrete advantage of providing an impacts-focussed vision of future risk, beyond what is achievable within conventional disciplinary boundaries. </p>

Thriving in Academia: Understanding and Managing the Complexities of Faculty Work

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketevan Mamiseishvili
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Education Research ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Work Setting ◽  
Higher Education Research ◽  
Faculty Work ◽  
College And University ◽  
Teaching Research ◽  
University Settings

In this paper, I will illustrate the changing nature and complexity of faculty employment in college and university settings. I will use existing higher education research to describe changes in faculty demographics, the escalating demands placed on faculty in the work setting, and challenges that confront professors seeking tenure or administrative advancement. Boyer’s (1990) framework for bringing traditionally marginalized and neglected functions of teaching, service, and community engagement into scholarship is examined as a model for balancing not only teaching, research, and service, but also work with everyday life.

Moving Forward

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet B. Ruscher
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
The People ◽  
Stationary Objects ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Affective Forecasts

Two distinct spatial metaphors for the passage of time can produce disparate judgments about grieving. Under the object-moving metaphor, time seems to move past stationary people, like objects floating past people along a riverbank. Under the people-moving metaphor, time is stationary; people move through time as though they journey on a one-way street, past stationary objects. The people-moving metaphor should encourage the forecast of shorter grieving periods relative to the object-moving metaphor. In the present study, participants either received an object-moving or people-moving prime, then read a brief vignette about a mother whose young son died. Participants made affective forecasts about the mother’s grief intensity and duration, and provided open-ended inferences regarding a return to relative normalcy. Findings support predictions, and are discussed with respect to interpersonal communication and everyday life.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document