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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-SA 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving.
Climate, Science and Society: A Primer makes cutting-edge research on climate change accessible to student readers. The primer consists of 37 short chapters organized within 11 parts written by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and other social science scholars. It covers a range of key topics including communication, justice and inequality, climate policy, and energy transitions, situating each one within the context of STS studies. Each reading translates a focused area of climate change research into short, accessible, and lively prose. Chapter authors open debates where relevant, consider policy implications, critique existing areas of research, and otherwise situate their reading within a larger body of research relevant to climate change courses. Designed as a jumping-off point for further exploration, this innovative book will be essential reading for students studying climate change, STS, environmental sociology, and environmental sciences.
The Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology serves as a repository of insight on the complex interactions, challenges and potential solutions that characterize our shared ecological reality. Presenting innovative thinking on a comprehensive range of topics, expert scholars, researchers, and practitioners illuminate the nuances, complexities and diverse perspectives that define the continually evolving field of environmental sociology.
The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming - just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of climate disaster have struck with ever more devastating force, and yet a notion has taken hold that the cause is now lost: the intolerable has become unavoidable. The limit will be overshot - perhaps two degrees as well - and the best we can do is cool down the Earth at some later point, towards the end of the century, by means of technologies not yet proven. How did this happen? How could the idea of overshoot gain such traction? What forces are driving us into a climate that people - particularly ...
This book highlights the increasing attention for climate engineering, a set of speculative technologies aimed to counter global warming. What is the future of the global climate? And who gets to decide—or even design—this future? Imagining Climate Engineering explores how and why climate engineering became a potential approach to anthropogenic climate change. Specifically, it showcases how views on the future of climate change and climate engineering evolved by addressing the ways in which climate engineers view its respective physical, political, and moral domains. Tracing the intellectual and political history of dreams to control the weather and climate as well as the discovery of cl...
This volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present. A rich balance of theoretical and practical discussion brings authority to this collection, which lays the foundations for timely responses to challenges ranging from the concept of the musical work, and the colonial values within Western musical culture, to unsustainable models of orchestral touring. The authors highlight how labour to meet the demands of particular futures for classical music might impact its creation and consumption, presenting case studies to capture the mediating roles of technology and community engagement. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of musicology and the sociology of music, as well as a general audience of practitioners, freelance musicians, music administrators and educators.
Climate Engineering: A Normative Perspective takes as its subject a prospective policy response to the urgent problem of climate change, one previously considered taboo. Climate engineering, the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change,” encapsulates a wide array of technological proposals. Daniel Edward Callies here focuses on one proposal currently being researched—stratospheric aerosol injection—which would spray aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere to thus reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight and slightly cool the globe. This book asks important questions that should guide moral and polit...
Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.
Tied to the profundity of life and death, media are and have always been existential. Yet, as they are deeply embedded in the lifeworld on both individual and global scales, they currently capitalize on human existence seemingly without limit, while being mythologized as boundless harbingers of the future and as solutions to the predicaments of a world now poised on the edge. In this situation it is imperative to move beyond either the habitual or the sublime, to recognize that media are in fact of limits--situated both in the middle of our lives and at the limit they constitute the building blocks and brinks of being. In order to remedy the existential deficit in the field, in Existential M...