Livable Futures Research Articles

From Structure to Purpose: Green and Social Narratives, and the Shifting Morality of Islamic Finance in Kuala Lumpur

Background: The anthropology of sustainability documents and interprets diverse visions of sustainable and liveable futures. Islamic scholars and financiers are now debating the distinctive contribution of Islamic finance to global sustainability. While mainstream global finance has only recently begun to pay explicit attention to social and environmental sustainability, Islamic economics has always emphasised the need to benefit society, the community, and the environment. Objectives: We ask what has been the influence of the emergence of green and social finance upon Islamic finance in Malaysia, the global centre of Islamic finance. Methods: The study is based on collaborative, co-productive ethnography and autoethnography, and textual analysis of working documents of the Securities Commission Malaysia, focusing on how environmental requirements are expressed in new financial products, known as green sukuks, or green Islamic bonds. Results and conclusions: We have found that much of the moral debate in Islamic finance has revolved around the distribution of financial risk: when investors share the risk of failure, they can participate in society rather than merely exploiting social relations, yet the emergence of ‘green’ Islamic finance appears to shift the centre of moral gravity away from risk structuring towards technical criteria of sustainability, replicating the growth-oriented anthropocentric managerialism of mainstream finance.

The Optimism of Catastrophe: Loss and Liveable Futures in Post-Disaster Turkey

ABSTRACT This article examines long-term experiences of loss and grief among survivors of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork in the region, I explore how subjectivity and temporality, loss and living on, can configure in the long aftermath of disaster. Drawing on the writings of Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî, I approach this relationship between disaster and future-making as a form of optimism. This article is part of a larger project concerned with the future of catastrophe – the ways that worlds and futures are fashioned in the wake of large-scale disaster.

School strike for climate: A reckoning for education

AbstractIn this article framing the special issue on the global school strikes for climate, we ask: what if education is not the solution, but part of the system young people want to change? In conversation with school strikers and reflecting on the contributions to this issue, we argue that the strikes pose a reckoning for education. Five key themes emerge from this special issue: (1) students are striking because of the affective weight of climate injustice; (2) students learn through their participation in striking, in contrast to the often insufficient climate change education taught in schools; (3) young people are becoming climate change educators through their roles as strikers; (4) strikers are patronised through paternalistic structures (including schooling) that ostensibly exist to protect them; and therefore (5) we need to reimagine education. We then advance four propositions for education in response to young people’s modest demands for a liveable future: (1) young people are in and of the collapsing climate; (2) youth voices need to be taken seriously, without excusing adult and collective responsibilities; (3) multigenerational, more-than-human, intercultural collaborations must be practiced in education for climate justice; and (4) we must learn to navigate ontological uncertainty and attend to ethical complexity.

The Future is Now: Climate Cases Before the ECtHR

ABSTRACT This article evaluates the potential role of the European Court of Human Rights in adjudicating cases related to climate change. The Court is currently facing its first four climate applications, and addressing them is more than a routine process of applying existing case law. These cases speak to fundamental questions regarding the Court’s engagement with systemic problems, politically and technically challenging issues, and its own subsidiarity to state decision-making. Looking at recent environmental case law, this article identifies and discusses various possible futures for the Court’s approach to climate cases, including from admissibility, substantive, and remedial perspectives. It also considers the tendencies and factors influencing the Court’s potential response to climate claims. This includes its docket crisis, its evolution towards a ‘procedural turn’, and its approach to the balancing of competing interests and its selection of the appropriate level of scrutiny. We conclude that the Court must contribute to the search for a modus vivendi that permits competing interests to coexist and ensures a liveable future. This is not only a question of ensuring future enjoyment of human rights, but also of safeguarding the Court’s own ability to carry out its role and to thrive into the future.

Storytelling through block play: imagining identities and creative citizenship

AbstractIn 2021, more than 80 million people worldwide will have been forced to flee their homes. Upon arrival in their new country, families may endure numerous hardships, yet succumbing to these challenges is not their single story. To understand how migrant‐background and refugee‐background children imagine more liveable futures beyond social and education barriers, financial stress and unresolved emotional issues, our study focuses on the stories that 8‐ to 10‐year‐old learners created while playing with building toys and stacking blocks in a Canadian elementary school. Drawing on the interconnected frameworks of story‐telling, identity, creative citizenship and play‐based pedagogies, our case study of 11 students illustrates that, in response to an invitation to support their real or imagined communities, learners engaged in literacy practices, built on their lived experiences and imagined strong identities to create stories of social responsibility and awareness, emphasising the human needs of securing food and fresh water, ensuring safety, and connecting and caring for the community. Our findings may encourage teachers to consider play‐based storytelling to address out‐of‐school social factors in their classrooms and to capitalise on students' inquiries to design interdisciplinary projects that can develop students' literacies and promote social activism.

Tourism worlding: Collective becoming in East Greenland

AbstractIn this article, we explore tourism development as an ongoing becoming-with and in the world. We draw on Haraway’s concept of worlding to describe the coming together of tourism not as a solitary or industry-related endeavour, but as entangled. We introduce the analytical concepts of frictions, companions and string figures to exemplify and discuss what this looks like when stepping closer to the tinkering with tourism. The article illustrates and discusses ways to re-conceptualise tourism development not as a simple solution to local problem, but as world-making in tension. We abstain from identifying “good” tourism and claims of how to pursue ways to “fix” tourism, instead tending to how tourism actors imagine and tinker with and around tourism towards more livable futures in a turbulent terrain.

Invasive Plant Relations in a Global Pandemic: Caring for a "Problematic Pesto".

In Spring 2020, amidst a COVID-19 state of emergency, the City of Toronto's Parks & Urban Forestry department posted signs in the city's remaining Black Oak Savannahs to announce the cancellation of the yearly 'prescribed burn' practice, citing fears it would exacerbate pandemic conditions. With this activity and other nature management events on hold, many invasive plants continued to establish and proliferate. This paper confronts dominant attitudes in invasion ecology with Indigenous epistemologies and ideas of transformative justice, asking what can be learned from building a relationship with a much-maligned invasive plant like garlic mustard. Written in isolation as the plant began to flower in the Black Oak savannahs and beyond, this paper situates the plant's abundance and gifts within pandemic-related 'cancelled care' and 'cultivation activism' as a means of exploring human-nature relations in the settler-colonial city. It also asks what transformative lessons garlic mustard can offer about precarity, non-linear temporalities, contamination, multispecies entanglements, and the impacts of colonial property regimes on possible relations. Highlighting the entanglements of historical and ongoing violences with invasion ecology, this paper presents 'caring for invasives' as a path toward more liveable futures.

“Passing Down Pollution”: (Inter)generational Toxicology and (Epi)genetic Environmental Health

Concern about the harmful health effects of industrial pollution is increasingly taking on an intergenerational dimension. In environmental health sciences such as toxicology, this has resulted in emphasizing the influence of toxic chemicals, substances, and situations across generations. Toxic relationalities are now being explored through research on gene-environment interaction, including toxicogenomics and epigenetic research through animal experiments and birth cohort studies. Based on fieldwork conducted among reproductive and developmental toxicologists working in Nanjing, China, this article shows how toxicological research both expresses and produces renewed anxieties about "passing down pollution." These toxicological accounts of intergenerational harm problematically work through overly simplistic renderings of reproduction and biological relatedness. But they also have the potential to catalyze creative understandings of toxic relationalities and responsibilities at a moment when making kin is increasingly seen as key to securing livable futures. [toxicology, environment, epigenetics, kinship, China].

Calling for Zoe as a Utopian Gesture

This exposition discusses the possibility of embracing an expanded notion of life, a zoe-centred egalitarianism, as proposed by Rosi Braidotti, in order to envision a liveable future on the planet and the utopian potential in the act of calling for an imaginary creature, a dragon, using as examples some video works created in 2012-2013 and retuned to in 2019.

“Doing one's work” in entrepreneurship studies: interpellation, distraction, disruption and transformation

PurposeThis paper takes seriously the feminist adage that “the personal is political” by critically exploring my experiences as an early career scholar of gender and entrepreneurship studies to offer vital context for the contributions of my work and future research agenda, in light of the current historical moment of interconnected political, public health and environmental calamity.Design/methodology/approachThe author presents reflections on her positionality, philosophical and political commitments, and theorises from her experiences of racist distraction and intersectional marginality in contemporary academia, considering their implications for incoming and aspiring gender and entrepreneurship scholars whose research agendas are still in development.FindingsRacism functions as a persistent distraction from overall research agendas and activities, and delimits the lane of perceived contributions. However, collectively challenging it in work and study presents a vehicle by which intellectual and affective experiences of academic work may be enriched, and a spacious and expansive legacy of critical scholarship built that will be resonant for years to come.Originality/valueThe paper argues that although racism will doubtlessly continue to cause immense distraction, it presents an invitation to create positive social change, through collectivising with a community that aims to shape a liveable, equitable and imaginative academic future.

Social Reproduction Theory: State of the field and new directions in geography

AbstractInterest in social reproduction theory (SRT) has been revived in the in the last ten odd years. This paper positions SRT, and its refraction through a geographic lens, as particularly well placed to address emerging issues in the context of ongoing crises—economic, environmental and of care—which have been enhanced by the Covid‐19 pandemic. I present an overview of the Marxist‐feminist traditions that constitute the basis for modern SRT. Through a survey of recent literature, I discuss the potential for extending contemporary SRT through intersectionality theory and suggest the need to draw on theoretical insights originating in the global periphery towards a postcolonial, decolonial SRT. Finally, I contextualize social reproduction theories within geography and suggest three emerging areas of scholarship in which combining a geographic and SRT perspective would yield productive understandings of the current moment and signal towards the construction of alternative, livable futures. These areas are debt and the financialization of social reproduction under neoliberalism; a turn towards a socioecological understanding of reproduction; and resistance, transformation and visions of the future through a “conscious appropriation” of life’s work and life sustaining practices at large.

Review of Intergenerational Education for Adolescents towards Liveable Futures by Kathryn Paige, David Lloyd and Richard Smith

Review of Intergenerational Education for Adolescents towards Liveable Futures by Kathryn Paige, David Lloyd and Richard Smith

Reimagining climate‐informed development: From “matters of fact” to “matters of care”

This paper is concerned with the impasse climate‐informed development practices currently find themselves in. This is represented by the fact that while “solutions” to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance capacities for adaptation and resilience are increasingly adopted around the world, we have enough evidence to suggest that strategies adopted “from above” have been unable to engender transformations towards more just and liveable futures. Situating the paper within recent calls for a “post‐adaptation” turn in the field, I propose a generative critique of climate‐informed development through the lens of care as a place from where to begin thinking and practicing development differently. The aim of this critique is not to discard or discredit development practices as necessarily tainted or flawed but to make them accountable to a whole set of concerns and cares going into their stories of success or failures. Throughout the paper, I therefore speculatively ask the reader to think though the possibilities that may be opened when we stop treating climate‐informed development projects as neutral and undisputable “matters of fact,” engaging with them instead as necessary and non‐innocent “matters of care.” Thinking through a tryptic notion of “matters of care,” as at the same time a neglected doing necessary for the sustenance of life, an affective state, and an ethico‐politics, I look at examples from semi‐arid areas of India to give visibility to those practices, relations, and emotions of care that have been marginalised by mainstream development circles. Through this shift in perception, a deeper understanding of vulnerability as a state of shared fragility emerges, one that grounds an ethico‐politics of climate‐informed development to concrete circumstances and becomes the foundation upon which more inclusive practices can be built upon.

Beyond the crisis: transitioning to a better world?

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is not just a short-term public health emergency. Instead, it has laid bare a broader and deeper organic crisis, produced by the intrinsic tensions and contradictions of the hegemonic neoliberal capitalist order. I discuss this organic crisis in terms of its active amplification of human divisiveness at various levels – class, racial, national, cultural – which impedes the generation of solidarity and cooperation in the name of a ‘common humanity’, required if humans are to live in harmony among each other and with the planet. By reflecting on a diverse range of barriers to such a desirable future, from the erosive role of human passions to the escalating new cold war between China and the West and the fundamental divisions exposed by the existential challenge of climate change, I argue that to have a chance of a liveable and equitable common future, we need to maintain a critical cosmopolitan horizon against the grain of self-interested closures and exclusions which underpin the organic crisis.

Talkin’ bout a revolution: an expert interview study exploring barriers and keys to engender change towards societal sufficiency orientation

Representative studies report high levels of acceptance of environmental protection and approval for stricter political measures to ensure a liveable future. However, in the last years, climate-damaging emissions did not decrease in accordance with the Paris Agreement, and important societal actors failed to implement effective strategies that could promote a socio-ecological transformation. Sufficiency with its underlying ‘mind-set’ can be a seen as leverage point for transformation and thus is targeted within our qualitative study. To explore barriers that prevent the implementation of knowledge about the sufficiency approach and ways to encourage sufficiency orientation on a societal level, we conducted interviews with experts from science, politics and economy (N = 21). Using qualitative content analysis, we identified keys for change, i.e., narratives, rewards and recognition, time structures and responsibilities that could have a leveraging effect towards system transformation. We propose an exploratory framework that points out main barriers, keys in terms of levers and experts’ visions towards a sufficiency-oriented society. Furthermore, we outline that the sufficiency discourse contains ambiguities and varieties concerning the experts’ perceptions regarding effective levers for a transformation. Through brief discourse pattern analysis, we highlight different perceptions regarding the role of technology, social responsibility and the societal change and time. The proposed framework can inspire future research and policy-making on sufficiency.

Group Roundtable: Queer Tech Futures, Social Justice, and Community-Based Technology Education

Abstract This essay describes a year-long community-based collaboration between faculty at Purdue University, a game designer at University of Chicago, and MAVEN Youth. Project partners sought to develop a community technology curriculum that centers the lives of LGBTQ and non-binary youth and imagines queer bodies as central to any future we wish to inhabit. Over the year-long project, the partners developed a series of social justice game design workshops for LGBTQ youth and a speculative design Hack-4-Queer Youth Futures. These types of collaborations and “making-and-telling” practices are vital to imagining inclusive and livable futures. This collaboration is an outgrowth of stakeholder engagement for the Big Data Ethics project at Purdue University supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of the group roundtable format is to gain better insight into the potential for embedding critical science and technology studies (STS) and social justice pedagogy into community-based tech diversity initiatives.

The En(Counter) of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Drawing on the horror and dark side of knowledge, which is in discrete complicity with the rational and powerful bases of power–the present article focuses on Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005). The paper attempts to draw analogies between the two set of characters Apollonian and Dionysian embodied in Henry Perowne and Baxter respectively. Perowne represents Western privilege and Baxter stands for the evil outsider. The absolute stable order of Perowne’s existence is challenged when he is involved in a car crash with a young man named Baxter who experiences violent mood swings as a symptom of Huntington’s disease. Saturday too, like most Ian McEwan’s novels engenders a tension between the two poles of human thought: doubt and faith, rational and intuitive, out of which this paper attempts to explore another facet of this dichotomy in the Nietzschean terminology of Apollonian and Dionysian spirit. By setting the novel in a single day in London, after 9/11 and during preparations for war in Iraq, McEwan affirms a constructivist theory of knowledge in literature where individuals and collectives (including novelists) participate in making up meaningful presents and liveable futures(a combination of two extremes of Apollonian and Dionysian). Keywords: Nietzsche; McEwan; Saturday; Perowne; Baxter

Political Ecologies of Race: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada

AbstractDrawing inspiration from popular efforts to connect a wide array of political struggles, this symposium examines the ways that racial‐colonial politics unfold through nature and environmental practices linking past, present, and future across the United States and Canada. By way of introduction, we ask: What does it mean to do political ecologies of race in Canada and the United States? For us the response cannot be additive—merely grafting attention to racial/colonial politics onto established scholarly conventions. Instead, we aim for a deeper analysis that challenges and enlivens the field of political ecology. This introduction highlights what is at stake, and identifies the ways that the contributors' research pushes the field. Ultimately, we argue that political ecologies of race can help reinvigorate intellectual projects and build liveable futures by recognising and supporting the connections between ongoing struggles. We hope this symposium contributes to the task.

Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene

Understanding the Anthropocene—as both a set of physiological phenomena and as an existential crisis of modernity—requires interrogating Earth-changing transformations in food and agriculture. Agri-food systems are not only at the core of alarming environmental trends; they also offer opportunities to directly engage important challenges to the Anthropocene concept. Many human geographers and other social scientists have raised critiques of the Anthropocene designation as glossing over social inequities, codifying a separation of humans from their environments, and naturalizing current transformations as complete and irreversible. In this article we interrogate the intersection between agri-food studies and critical Anthropocene scholarship, arguing that agri-food systems serve as a through line to competing Anthropocene origin stories, a source of theoretical insight for the complexity of human–environment relations, and a site of agency for engaging alternative futures. First, we examine four of the most commonly proposed starting points for the Anthropocene epoch, arguing that a focus on food and agriculture at each historical moment reveals the limits, frictions, and social unevenness of anthropogenic change. Second, we highlight theoretical tools from critical agrarian studies that help build a more complex understanding of agriculture and the Anthropocene, emphasizing the active role of agroecosystems and the centrality of structural inequalities to agroenvironmental change. Finally, we examine how food- and agriculture-related social movements are working to forge more livable futures by accounting for precisely the matters that characterizations of the Anthropocene as an epoch of global human dominance frequently overlook: socioecological unity and political economic difference.

Alterlivability

AbstractThis article responds to two diverging notions of “livability”: the normative New Urbanist imaginary of livable cities, where the urban good life manifests in neoliberal consumer cultures, green gentrification, and inaccessible infrastructures, and the feminist and disability concept of livable worlds, such as those in which nonnormate life thrives. Whereas the former ought to broaden its notion of “lives worth living,” the latter would benefit from a more specific theory of design—the making and remaking of more livable worlds. In response, this article offers the concept of “alterlivability,” a design philosophy grounded in permaculture ethics. Drawing on two novels by ecofeminist writer Starhawk—The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994) and City of Refuge (2016)—the article explores the genre of speculative design fiction for its insights into prototyping more livable futures in the Anthropocene. Starhawk’s novels illustrate alterlivability as a set of political commitments, design methodologies, and spatial forms that place disabled, racialized, and poor people at the center of alterlivable worlds.