Sustainability, Wellbeing and the Posthuman Turn

Sustainability, Wellbeing and the Posthuman Turn
Author: Thomas S. J. Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2018-07-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319940783

This book examines how the way we conceive of, or measure, the environment changes the way we interact with it. Thomas Smith posits that environmentalism and sustainable development have become increasingly post-political, characterised by abstraction, and quantification to an unprecedented extent. As such, the book argues that our ways of measuring both the environment, such as through sustainability metrics like footprints and Payments for Ecosystem Services, and society, through gross domestic product and wellbeing measures, play a constitutive and problematic role in how we conceive of ourselves in the world. Subsequently, as the quantified environmental approach drives a dualistic wedge between the human and non-human realms, in its final section the book puts forward recent developments in new materialism and feminist ethics of care as providing practical ways of re-founding sustainable development in a way that firmly acknowledges human-ecological relations. This book will be an invaluable reference for scholars and students in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and environmental sociology.

Transport in Human Scale Cities

Transport in Human Scale Cities
Author: Mladenović, Miloš N.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1800370512

This timely book calls for a paradigm shift in urban transport, which remains one of the critically uncertain aspects of the sustainability transformation of our societies. It argues that the potential of human scale thinking needs to be recognised, both in understanding people on the move in the city and within various organisations responsible for cities.

Arts, Sustainability and Education

Arts, Sustainability and Education
Author: Ernst Wagner
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2021-09-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811634521

This book explores the potential of arts and cultural education to contribute to on-going efforts to promote Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in line with UNESCO’s conceptualizations of the field. It builds on the experiences of arts educators working to build sustainable futures and portrays new and innovative approaches. Chapters comprise case studies that combine arts, culture, sustainable thinking and practices. They also include research from historical perspectives, evaluations of public policy measures and offer theoretical approaches and methodologies. The book unfolds the possible relationships between arts and cultural education and Education for Sustainable Development.

Opening Windows

Opening Windows
Author: Kate Sherren
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1646426304

The third decennial review from the International Association for Society and Natural Resources, Opening Windowssimultaneously examines the breadth and societal relevance of Society and Natural Resources (SNR) knowledge, explores emergent issues and new directions in SNR scholarship, and captures the increasing diversity of SNR research. Authors from various backgrounds—career stage, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, and global region—provide a fresh, nuanced, and critical look at the field from both researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives. This reflexive book is organized around four key themes: diversity and justice, governance and power, engagement and elicitation, and relationships and place. This is not a complacent volume—chapters point to gaps in conventional scholarship and to how much work remains to be done. Power is a central focus, including the role of cultural and economic power in “participatory” approaches to natural resource management and the biases encoded into the very concepts that guide scholarly and practical work. The chapters include robust literature syntheses, conceptual models, and case studies that provide examples of best practices and recommend research directions to improve and transform natural resource social sciences. An unmistakable spirit of hope is exemplified by findings suggesting positive roles for research in the progress ahead. Bringing fresh perspectives on the assumptions and interests that underlie and entangle scholarship on natural resource decisionmaking and the justness of its outcomes, Opening Windows is significant for scholars, students, natural resource practitioners, managers and decision makers, and policy makers.

Posthumanist Vulnerability

Posthumanist Vulnerability
Author: Christine Daigle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2023-06-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350302902

A timely dethroning of the human subject and embracing of a new kind of existence, in this book Christine Daigle highlights the affirmative potential of vulnerability amidst unprecedented times of more-than-human crises. By bringing together traditions as diverse as feminist materialist philosophy, phenomenology, and affect theory, Daigle convincingly pleas for the radical embracing of a shared posthumanist vulnerability. Posthuman Vulnerability fills a significant theoretical gap - whilst feminism has explored the affirming power of vulnerability, it's been from a very human-centric viewpoint. In posing a feminist and posthuman take on vulnerability, Daigle is bridging traditions in a totally original and much needed way.

Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management

Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management
Author: Samuel Idowu
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 4043
Release: 2023-11-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 303125984X

This encyclopedia is the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of reference for sustainability in business and management. It covers both traditional and emerging concepts and terms and is fully international in its scope. More than 700 contributions of internationally renowned experts provide a definitive access to the knowledge in the area of sustainable and responsible management. All actors in the field will find reliable and up to date definitions and explanations of the key terms and concepts of management in this reference work. The Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management represents all aspects of management and business conduct. It takes sustainability as a management concept that gives due credit to the complexity and diverging constraints in which businesses and corporations act today, and it emphasizes and focuses approaches that help ensure that today's management decisions and actions will be the basis for tomorrow's prosperity.

Climate Change, Small-Scale Fisheries, and Blue Justice

Climate Change, Small-Scale Fisheries, and Blue Justice
Author: Sunil D. Santha
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2023-04-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100086815X

This book is a narrative non-fiction, based on the patchy epistemologies of traditional small-scale fishers in India and the Indian Ocean region. It specifically explores the impact of climate change on Fish and Fishers, and the mutual entanglements in their eco-social world. Further, it critically examines the nature of climate change adaptation and its implications on small-scale fisheries. Both climate change impact and adaptation responses are examined from the situated knowledge and everyday lived experiences of Fishers. Stories of their everyday struggles from diverse eco-social worlds shape these patchy epistemologies. Further, this book through these stories unearths the transitions in governance and changing relationships between Fish, Fishers, and the rest of the eco-social world. Responding ethically to the problems of climate change, warming oceans, fish scarcity, overfishing, and pollution requires us to break away from the paradigms that locate Nature and Society as binaries and commodities. Blue justice can be achieved only if strategies aimed at adaptation, conservation and well-being are dialogical, inclusive, and Fish-Fisher centred. This book offers insights into the worldviews of Fishers and their stewardship, wisdom, and experience in healing today’s warming world. Locating the eco-social worlds of Fish and Fishers in alternative worldviews, this book strives to find meaningful pathways for just transitions. It will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the field of climate change, fisheries, disaster studies, and sustainable livelihoods as well as related subjects of social work and social justice.

Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times

Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times
Author: Karen Malone
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2017-01-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811025509

This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times. The authors explore these new imaginings for sustainability using varying theoretical perspectives in order to consider innovative ways of engaging with concepts that are now influencing the field of sustainability and education. Through their theoretical analysis, research and field work, the authors explore novel approaches to designing sustainability and sustainability education. These approaches, although diverse in focus, all highlight the complex interdependencies of the human and more-than-human world, and by unpacking binaries such as human/nature, nature/culture, subject/object and de-centring the human expose the complexities of an entangled human-nature relation that are shaping our understanding of sustainability. These messy relations challenge the well-versed mantras of anthropocentric exceptionalism in sustainability and sustainability education and offer new questions rather than answers for researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore. As working with new theoretical lenses is not always easy, this book also highlights the authors’ methods for approaching these ideas and imaginings.

Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life

Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life
Author: Karen Lykke Syse
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317747801

What does it mean to live a good life in a time when the planet is overheating, the human population continues to steadily reach new peaks, oceans are turning more acidic, and fertile soils the world over are eroding at unprecedented rates? These and other simultaneous harms and threats demand creative responses at several levels of consideration and action. Written by an international team of contributors, this book examines in-depth the relationship between sustainability and the good life. Drawing on wealth of theories, from social practice theory to architecture and design theory, and disciplines, such as anthropology and environmental philosophy, this volume promotes participatory action-research based approaches to encourage sustainability and wellbeing at local levels. It covers topical issues such the politics of prosperity, globalization, and indigenous notions of "the good life" and happiness". Finally it places a strong emphasis on food at the heart of the sustainability and good life debate, for instance binding the global south to the north through import and exports, or linking everyday lives to ideals within the dream of the good life, with cookbooks and shows. This interdisciplinary book provides invaluable insights for researchers and postgraduate students interested in the contribution of the environmental humanities to the sustainability debate.

Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing

Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing
Author: Paola Spinozzi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2017-11-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1315306573

Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies examines and assesses the interdependence between sustainability and wellbeing by drawing attention to humans as producers and consumers in a post-human age. Why wellbeing ought to be regarded as essential to sustainable development is explored first from multifocal theoretical perspectives encompassing sociology, literary criticism and socioeconomics, second in relation to institutions and policies, and third with a focus on specific case studies across the world. Wellbeing and its sustainability are defined in terms of biological and cultural diversity; stages of advancement in science and technology; notions of citizenship and agency; geopolitical scenarios and environmental conditions. Wellbeing and sustainability call for enquiries into human capacities in ontological, epistemological and practical terms. A view of sustainability that revolves around material and immaterial wellbeing is based on the assumption that life quality, comfort, happiness, security, safety always posit humans as both recipients and agents. Risk and resilience in contemporary societies define the intrinsically human ability to make and consume, to act and adapt, driving the search for and fruition of wellbeing. How to sustain the dual process of exploitation and regeneration is a task that requires integrated approaches from the sciences and the humanities, jointly tracing a worldwide cartography with clear localisations. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers interested in sustainability through conceptual and empirical approaches including social theory, literary and cultural studies, environmental economics and human ecology, urbanism and cultural geography.