Sustainability and Social Contestation

Course goals

• To learn, understand and apply new theoretical approaches and concepts around the themes of sustainability, social contestation, active citizenship, societal participation in environmental sustainability. To be able to elaborate on them in exam questions and in in-class activities.
• To analyse both academic and societal debates about social sustainability (such as waste and pollution, planetary commons, sustainable citizenship), developing an understanding of the arguments at hand and one’s own critical and scientifically sound position. To exercise such skills in a group moderating task.
• To learn to report on the theoretical and ethnographic findings presented in the course in a scientific way (using argumentation, organization, and analysis). To learn to present research findings and literature analysis in a written paper.

Content

The course is organized around two main ideas.

First, sustainability is a contested terrain. The understanding of the notion is shaped by different actors (media, science, policy makers, religious actors, social movements, private companies...), ideologies, and paradigms, promoting and legitimizing different practices and agendas. The course will address these debates from an anthropological perspective, looking at the interplay and contradictions between society/individual, economy/politics, nature/environment, knowledge/technology/infrastructure, global/planetary and their consequences in terms of power relations and social (in)equality.

Second, social contestation increasingly takes place in closed (or closing) political spaces. Nowadays social struggles happen in contexts which deviate from the ideal type of democracy often associated to the notion of citizenship, or in (more or less) new spaces beyond the traditional political institutions. While different theories (political development, democratization, the end of history) considered globalisation as a linear and universal pattern towards the “western” model of liberal democracy, in the last years we have witnessed the emergence of alternative political ideologies and models like the Chinese one, of “hybrid regimes”, “illiberal democracies”, the return of authoritarianism, as well as the crisis of representative democracy, the advent of post-democracy and the rise of populism, conspiracy theories and “alternative truths”.

The course will therefore explore how social contestation and citizenship in relation to sustainability, environmental issues, and the predicaments of global capitalism happen in closed - or closing - political spaces in a planetary age. What do these contestations tell us about the relations between capitalism, environment, democracy or environmental and social justice? How does this analysis push us to re-think the notion of citizenship in relation to sustainability and to imagine new spaces to exercise it?