Toward Empathic Agonism: Conflicting Vulnerabilities in Urban Wetland Governance

Abstract

Critics of attempts to achieve consensus through Habermasian 'communicative rationality' dismiss this as unachievable due to participants' selfishness and irrationality, and the inevitability of power relations. Instead, Mouffe advocates 'agonistic pluralism', a dynamic process of continual debate grounded in mutual respect. In this paper I argue that, for this to succeed, we need to recognize and embrace the role of emotion in moral reasoning. Here, I examine a dispute over wetland management in suburban New Jersey. Each side articulated distinct understandings of what was and was not vulnerable, backed by emotional appeals partly based in self-interest but that also encompassed care and concern for others. Each side accused the other of being irrational and immoral, drawing 'moral microboundaries' between them. I conclude that participants in a public debate may not simply be pursing self-serving goals, nor might open communication resolve their differences. Instead, each may be deeply convinced that he or she is advocating the most rational and moral course of action. This questions the very notion of a unitary, potentially agreed-upon 'common good' and instead challenges us to attempt to grasp each other's moral worlds, and in particular the emotional bases of these, through the seeming oxymoron that I term 'empathic agonism'.

Towards just production of tourism space via dialogical everyday politics in destination communities

“…The above means that, even if a group's agency appears irresponsible when observed from the outside, justice may be the goal of its subjective approach. Horowitz (2013Horowitz ( : 2357 explains the same phenomenon by pointing out that each group may have an argument 'grounded not in selfish irrationality but in clear, if distinct and mutually incompatible, reasoning processes' which causes 'moral microboundaries' between groups. This indicates that the causes of unjust actions are not in the individual per se but rather in the social.…”

Emotions, power, and environmental conflict: Expanding the ‘emotional turn’ in political ecology

“…Human geographers and political ecologists are increasingly interested in the role emotions play in relation to environmental governance and conflicts. A look at the Scopus database reveals that several papers, all of them published after 2011, include in their title, abstract or keywords the terms "emotion" and "political ecology" (Brisbois et al, 2017;Croog, 2016;Dallman et al, 2013;Doshi, 2016;González-Hidalgo, 2017;Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013;Horowitz, 2013;Nightingale, 2012Nightingale, , 2013Pratt, 2012;Raento, 2016;Sultana, 2011;Wooden, 2014). Back in 2015, Farhana Sultana coined the term "Emotional Political Ecology" and shaped this recent "emotional turn" in political ecology into a more coherent body of work.…”

“…In sum, what joins together feminist and emotional political ecologists is the aim to further discuss and nuance contradictions of capital and labour, where considering emotion helps to better understand power in human-environment relationships.Although feminist political ecologists have pushed the limits of explanation of the political role of emotions in environmental conflicts, the complexity of the political work of emotions engages with several other dimensions of socio-ecological conflicts. As Bujis and Lawrence (2013) argue, there are diverse aspects of conflicts in which emotions are to be considered: emotions as sources of diverging views on resource management (seeHorowitz, 2013 for an example of this), emotional influences on the processing of information, the motivating power of emotions for social movements and the role of emotion in the escalation of protest (seeDallman et al, 2013 for an example). Looking at those aspects demands an analysis of a wider range of literatures that can unpack how "the political" is in itself constituted by several emotional dimensions.…”

Constitutional and post-constitutional problems: Reconsidering the issues of public interest, agonistic pluralism and private property in planning

“…In this case, the principal author of reference is indubitably Chantal Mouffe (1993Mouffe ( , 2005Mouffe ( , 2013). Mouffe's theory has been amply considered and debated in the recent planning literature (Amin, 2002;Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010;Bond, 2011;Collins, 2010;Fougère and Bond, 2016;Grange, 2014;Hillier, 2000Hillier, , 2003Horowitz, 2013;Lysgård and Cruickshank, 2013;McClymont, 2011;McGuirk, 2001;Newman, 2011;Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010;Pløger, 2004;Ramsey, 2008;Roskamm, 2015;Yamamoto, 2017).…”