Narrative Nuance (Asynchronous Session)
The Utilization of Short Film as a Means of Accelerating Behavior Change: Film and Popular Media as Catalysts for Social Awareness View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marie Miller
My thesis focuses on research regarding attachment and care of products as a means of combating a culture of disposability, exploitation, and frugality. This idea has been part of the past, but is now lost due to a combination of factors including the Amazon Effect, industrialization, globalization, planned obsolescence, and perceived obsolescence. Although the foundation for current culture was largely laid shortly after World War II, current influencers are significantly promoted by means of social media. Members of the public are greatly influenced and even educated, in a fashion, by such short film distributors as YouTube. Rather than utilizing this tool for advertising or self-promotion, the author proposes the use of three-minute films that showcase the work of artists and craftspersons working in sustainable ways to positively move culture toward a the tipping point when the cultural norm ceases to externalize costs now paid primarily by the environment and persons in developing countries, as well as members of minority groups in the United States.
Deep(ening) Inclusion for Transformation: Democratic Challenges in Transdisciplinarity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristiaan Kok
Transdisciplinary research and innovation efforts have emerged as a means to democratize science and technology and address challenges to sustainable transformation. One of the main elements of transdisciplinary efforts is the ‘inclusion’ of different stakeholders, values and perspectives in participatory research and innovation processes. In practice however, ‘doing inclusion’ raises a number of challenges and choices deserving of critical attention. In this study, we problematize and deepen the concept of inclusion in order to better understand how challenges in ‘doing inclusion’ emerge. We turn to democratic theory and invoke Brown’s five elements of democratic representation (resemblance, participation, deliberation, accountability, authorization) that we consider dimensions of democracy. We argue that this helps to understand how challenges to ‘doing inclusion’ occur in participatory processes, as a result of tensions between these different dimensions of democracy. We illustrate this deepened approach through an analysis of ‘doing inclusion’ in the transdisciplinary FIT4FOOD2030 project (2017-2020), that aimed to contribute to transforming EU research and innovation systems so that they are better equipped to serve as catalysts for food system transformation. Based on three years of action-research (including interviews, workshops and field observations), we identify 8 challenges to ‘doing inclusion’ in FIT4FOOD2030 that represent tensions between different dimensions of democracy. Finally we reflect on the politics of inclusion and present lessons for Deep(ening) Inclusion towards democratic engagement. We hope that our findings contribute to better grasping and addressing democratic challenges in transdisciplinarity by highlighting how inclusion can be done wrong, while it is being done right.
California Dreaming: The Role of Economic Narrative in Ecological Change View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Charis Franz
At the center of debates over policies to address climate change is the age-old tension between economic growth and environmental protection. The dominant narrative of unbridled economic growth measured by GDP has been brought into question by ecological economic scholars as the root cause of ecological damage, leading to a call for other ways to think about economic success that are more closely connected to material reality. With the newly elected U.S. President, Joe Biden, calling climate change an “existential threat” and making it a top priority for his administration amidst a deeply divided Congress, this debate is poised to come to the forefront of the country’s political discourse over the next four years. Through the lens of critical ecofeminism, I examine this tension as it appears in California’s newly proposed “Shared Roadmap to Prosperity,” aimed at addressing economic inequality in the state. Informed by the principles of ecological economics and post-growth theory, I suggest that, if pushed further, the proposed Roadmap could create a new narrative for discussing economic success in terms of equity and social justice issues. It presents an opportunity for activists and politicians to not only address the threat of climate change, but also the possibilities of the California Dream in the current age.
Can Sustainability Be Sustained?: How the Anthropology of the Anthropocene Questions the Concept of Sustainability
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriel Soares
The pioneering gaia theory, developed in the 1970s, proposed that it was life that was the unstable, dynamic element, responsible for creating and maintaining the conditions for planetary habitability. Recent discussions about the Anthropocene within anthropology can be seen as questioning the concept of sustainability from a few different angles. Is sustainability predicated on a separation between nature and culture, which is meaningless in non-western ontologies? Does it rely on a deterritorialized, detached point of view? Is sustainability still rooted in a fundamentally extractive model of the relationship between human and non-human entities? This paper argues that, from an anthropological perspective, sustainable and unsustainable practices don't so much designate opposed polarities, but rather value judgements on the extrapolation of prospective futures.
