A New World Coming

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter continues to explore transformations. It explores the kinds of problems and issues that spur contestation and struggles for change. In our contemporary world, there is no shortage of problems and issues that have prompted and are prompting major transformations in the ways people live and work. The Zeitgeist of the 1960 and 1970s is recalled and some of the transformations of that period are noted. Two contemporary transformations are briefly analysed using the theory of practice architectures: the Black Lives Matter movement, and changes in Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations in Australia. three ‘transformational moments’ are then briefly described, again using the theory of practice architectures: the swift transformation that occurred in the days after the May 23, 2021 capture of a Ryanair flight by the Belarusian Air Force that prompted a swift imposition of sanctions on Belarus by the European Union; the very slow transformation still underway and far from complete occurring in relation to the global climate emergency; and the dramatic transformation that occurred when the world was forced to respond to the global Coronavirus pandemic (the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease). These examples show how transformations take place on very different timescales, but they also show that transformations do happen. The chapter shows that they involve collective, distributed action by many people; they are the products of, and provoke, contestation; that transformation is in a dialectical tension with institutionalisation. The chapter also uses the theory of practice architectures to demonstrate how transformations always involve interrelated changes in language and discourses, in the dimension of semantic space, in activity and work in the dimension of physical space–time, and in relationships of solidarity and power in the dimension of social space. It is suggested that the kinds of transformations discussed in this chapter are changes in which, to a greater or lesser degree, one form of life comes to be replaced by another.