“…This idea undermines the dominance of one-size-fits-all perspectives in sustainability pursuits and highlights the need to recognize diverse visions for and perspectives about local environments [69][70][71][72][73][74][75]. Rice and colleagues [76] echo the conclusions of many of these authors when they remind academics that their failure to fully incorporate non-academic perspectives in their research perpetuates the dominant technocratic discourse of sustainability, and limits our willingness to experiment with new ideas or possibilities.…”
Section: Social Sustainability As Place-centered Process-oriented Sumentioning
Abstract:Sustainability is often conceived of as an attempt to balance competing economic, environmental and social priorities. Over the course of three decades of scholarship, however, the meaning and appropriate application of the 'social pillar' continues to inspire confusion. In this paper, we posit that the inherent challenge of understanding social sustainability is its many legitimate meanings plus a lack of interdisciplinary scholarship. We draw from literature in multiple disciplines to illustrate five different ways that the concept of social sustainability has been applied in scholarship and professional practice, and highlighting the importance of applications that acknowledge placed-based, process-oriented perspectives that understand social, economic, and environmental imperatives as integrated concepts. Ironically, this framing forecloses on social sustainability as an entity distinct from environmental and economic sustainability. We believe that organizing the conversation around these five applications can help advocates of sustainability use the concept of social sustainability in clear and powerful ways while avoiding applications that relegate the social dimensions of sustainability to an afterthought.
“…This idea undermines the dominance of one-size-fits-all perspectives in sustainability pursuits and highlights the need to recognize diverse visions for and perspectives about local environments [69][70][71][72][73][74][75]. Rice and colleagues [76] echo the conclusions of many of these authors when they remind academics that their failure to fully incorporate non-academic perspectives in their research perpetuates the dominant technocratic discourse of sustainability, and limits our willingness to experiment with new ideas or possibilities.…”
Section: Social Sustainability As Place-centered Process-oriented Sumentioning
Abstract:Sustainability is often conceived of as an attempt to balance competing economic, environmental and social priorities. Over the course of three decades of scholarship, however, the meaning and appropriate application of the 'social pillar' continues to inspire confusion. In this paper, we posit that the inherent challenge of understanding social sustainability is its many legitimate meanings plus a lack of interdisciplinary scholarship. We draw from literature in multiple disciplines to illustrate five different ways that the concept of social sustainability has been applied in scholarship and professional practice, and highlighting the importance of applications that acknowledge placed-based, process-oriented perspectives that understand social, economic, and environmental imperatives as integrated concepts. Ironically, this framing forecloses on social sustainability as an entity distinct from environmental and economic sustainability. We believe that organizing the conversation around these five applications can help advocates of sustainability use the concept of social sustainability in clear and powerful ways while avoiding applications that relegate the social dimensions of sustainability to an afterthought.
“…Thus, there have been a host of calls to place greater attention on local, lay or vernacular understandings of climate (Brace and Geoghegan ; Head and Gibson ; Gaillard and Mercer ; Rice et al . ). The key research challenge in this shift is well‐expressed by Jasanoff when she askshow, at the levels of community, polity, space and time, will scientists' impersonal knowledge of the climate be synchronized with the mundane rhythms of lived lives and the specificities of human experience?…”
Section: For a Hybrid Epistemology: Expanding Climate Perception And mentioning
This special section grew out of a series of sessions on 'Mixed methods and hybrid epistemologies' at the Association of American Geographers annual meetings in 2013 and 2014. The five papers that comprise it each examine climate change as a mixed or hybrid entity, and consider some of the theoretical and methodological tensions associated with contemporary climate change research. In so doing, the authors reflect on the challenges of field-based observation and measurement, and they draw on a rich array of conceptual resources in attempting to capture climate's multidimensional character. In this brief introduction, I consider the contributions of the papers in the context of three areas of climate change scholarship: climate knowledge, ontologies of climate and the methodologies of climate change research. Taken as a whole, the collection suggests the value of a methodological and epistemological pluralism, one capable of registering the hybrid character of climate change and coping with the fact that multiple measurements, understandings and enactments of climate may be equally valid.
“…Acknowledging that: “What counts as ‘evidence’ and what passes for ‘relevant knowledge’ are necessarily relative to the diverse and debatable values and goals that different societies hold dear” (Castree, , p. 65), research has emphasized that climate change has multiple meanings for different communities and places (Castree, ; Hulme, ; Rice, Burke, & Heynen, ). Drawing on Haraway's ideas of “feminine objectivity” (an understanding of knowledge as limited and situated), Israel and Sachs () call for revaluation of the local environmental knowledge possessed by women, people of color, and people of the global South.…”
Section: Geographers' Contributions To Climate Knowledgementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Similarly, Geoghegan and Leyshon's () ethnography of farming practices in Cornwall, England illustrates how lay narratives of climate change discourse are drawn from embodied and experiential forms of knowledge, such as farming practices and memories of weather. Bringing these alternatives ways of knowing to light is important since: “Valuing people's everyday experiences of climate change and diverse ways of knowing climate (even when they might be scientifically imprecise) provides the possibility for people and communities to act on climate change through the knowledge and experience they already have” (Rice et al, , p. 254, emphasis added). Given the growing concern over the lack of nonscientific institutional progress along a path illuminated by evidence (Ripple et al, ; Shabecoff, ; Union of Concerned Scientists, , ), and demands for actionable research (Castree et al, ; Dilling & Lemos, ; McNie, ), geographers might operationalize these insights through collaborative research efforts.…”
Section: Geographers' Contributions To Climate Knowledgementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Yeh () echoes this sentiment, arguing that to deny the validity of local knowledge is to “perpetuate the ultimately colonial practice of allowing unacknowledged (Western) epistemologies to masquerade as universal ones” (p. 3). More closely engaging with such communities—as coresearchers and producers of knowledge rather than simply as “stakeholders”—thus holds the potential to democratize climate science by making space for “more democratic debate and argument based in a wider discussion of values, norms, and experiences” (Rice et al, , p. 254) relating to climate and by incorporating plural ways of valuing and knowing the environment. As Castree et al () write: “different conceptions of needs may frame plural notions about ‘appropriate solutions’ and ‘relevant evidence’” (p. 763).…”
Section: A Critical Physical Geography Approach To Climate Modelingmentioning
Despite repeated calls for greater collaboration between physical and human geographers, the unique interdisciplinary potential of geography remains largely underutilized. Yet geographers are well positioned to take a leading role in the interdisciplinary turn in climate‐related research. This paper explores the possibilities for physical and human geographers to collaborate within and beyond the discipline, specifically on the topic of climate modeling. We first examine geographical research critically examining the production and circulation of climate knowledge. Drawing on insights from a recent literature called “Critical Physical Geography,” we then outline how geographers might engage in collaborative and interdisciplinary work in order to promote more democratic practices of producing climate knowledge, enrich understandings of climate change, and more effectively serve goals of social and environmental justice. We argue that both the discipline of geography and the field of climate research stand to gain enormously from geographers' efforts to talk across the divide between social and natural science within and beyond the boundaries of geography.
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