Sustainability without the I-sense is nonsense

Despite the rapid expansion of sustainability science in recent decades, sustainability crises have continued to grow. Sustainability researchers argue that this is partly the result of neglecting people’s inner worlds and call for a stronger consideration of inner states and processes in sustainability scholarship. We argue that the advancement of personal sustainability science, i.e., the systematic inquiry of inner worlds in relation to sustainability, is currently impeded by at least two unresolved issues. First, attitudes, emotions, values, and the like have frequently been the object of sustainability-related research. It thus remains unclear to what exactly researchers should more closely look at when inquiring into people’s inner worlds. Second, the epistemological and methodological foundations for conducting research on inner worlds remain underdeveloped. We illustrate that current research activities usually remain at a phenomenologically shallow level. In response to these issues, we provide conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry within personal sustainability science, allowing for an in-depth understanding and potentially even a transformation of people’s inner worlds with regard to sustainability. Overall, we suggest redirecting personal sustainability science more strongly toward the inquiry into people’s subjective (i.e., first-person) experiences of inner states and processes unfolding in relation to sustainability.

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Social-Aesthetic Strategies for a Change of Heart

Sacks

2024

The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics

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This chapter introduces the Connective Practice Approach a redemptive, social-aesthetic practice that enables a change of heart. This approach is of special relevance to engaging with personal and social dilemmas caused by mutually exclusive and disconnected ways of thinking and living in the world. Central features of this approach and its transformative potential are shared through ‘guiding images’, its ‘making social honey’ theory of change, and a connective imagination, ‘inner atelier’ methodology that is integral to this social honey process. Connective practice examples described as ‘instruments of consciousness’ highlight (i) the necessity of individual insight for enabling collective insight, and (ii) the phenomenological process of bracketing or epoché for clearing the inner space, for ‘seeing what we think’, for making shifts, and for developing new imaginaries. Connecting forms of mindfulness and Joseph Beuys’ ‘social sculpture’ ideas about the ‘invisible materials’ of speech, discussion, and thought, this chapter (a) offers an expanded notion of the aesthetic as all that enlivens, (b) sees responsibility as an ability-to-respond, (c) explores capacities needed for a living future, (d) reveals the sacramental nature of connecting inner and outer work, and (e) of coming to insights individually and together as a process of resurrecting the overlooked, uncared-for, crucified world in us.

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Sustainability without the I-sense is nonsense

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Values in transformational sustainability science: four perspectives for change

Values in transformational sustainability science: four perspectives for change

Directing personal sustainability science toward subjective experience: conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry into inner worlds

Social-Aesthetic Strategies for a Change of Heart

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