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- Convenor:
-
Carl Maida
(University of California, Los Angeles)
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- Track:
- Producing the Earth
- Location:
- University Place 4.211
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Cultivating sustainability literacy and public engagement on its behalf requires diverse cultural perspectives, trans-generational timeframes, and local-to-global connectedness. Communities of practice ensure greater engagement for sustainability by the public as local and global citizen scientists.
Long Abstract:
The need to promote participatory approaches to sustainability literacy in the broader public is clear, however few community-based approaches have been developed to date that integrate disciplines into a holistic perspective of Earth's natural and human systems. Cultivating sustainability literacy and public engagement on its behalf requires embracing diverse cultural perspectives, trans-generational timeframes, and local-to-global connectedness. The complex environmental challenges brought about by rapid development and growth of human populations, together with the current technological revolution that has changed both lifestyles and social norms, call for a new approach to learning that facilitates interdisciplinary action on behalf of sustainability. A need for integrative science and education has shifted the emphasis toward actively using what learners know to explore, negotiate, interpret, and create through collaborative activities across disciplines. As a potentially disruptive innovation, interdisciplinary collaborative learning challenges researchers, students and the public to acknowledge their roles as participants engaged in producing knowledge that integrates and synthesizes data from diverse fields into a whole-systems perspective. The panel focuses on theoretical and case-based papers and discussions of communities of practice to illustrate how researchers, students, policy and community leaders, and the broader public, come to engage in community-based transformational sustainability research and practice. Panelists discuss how networks of researchers, educational practitioners and experts communicate with a wider audience to translate sustainability concepts into terms broadly understood by the public, and on how emergent communities of practice ensure greater engagement on behalf of sustainability by the public, as citizen scientists, locally, nationally, and globally.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 9 August, 2013, -Linda D'Amico (Winona State University)
Paper short abstract:
Intag in northwest Ecuador represents a microcosm of the planet’s most salient problems having to do with development, governance, and climate justice. The region offers lessons about sustainability, civic participation, biodiversity and climate change for the future of life all over the globe.
Paper long abstract:
The region of Intag in northwest Ecuador represents a microcosm of some of the planet's most salient problems having to do with development, governance, and climate justice. It raises the following questions: Do local communities have the right to determine what kind of development goes on in their 'neighborhood', where their livelihoods are contingent on healthy ecosystems and their neighbors include still undocumented species of plants and animals? What rights do rural women and men have to the power of transnational capital in the form of extractive industries in the search for minerals to quench the insatiable 'need' for commodities in the global north? Why does the northwest corner of the Ecuadorian Andes matter, and what lessons about civic participation, biodiversity and climate change do events in Intag reveal for the future of women, men and children all over the globe?
Generally, responses to global crises, such as natural disaster, poverty, civil unrest, and other natural and human insecurities, have been overly focused on scientific and economic solutions. In this case, I follow social resolutions. The stories of natural and social histories, confrontation, coalescence and new ways forward are compelling as women and men from Intag struggled in alliance with outsiders to come up with creative solutions to confront development on their own terms. The civic and gendered dimensions of social empowerment in Intag, within the context of local and global political ecologies, are instructive for anyone interested in the crises surrounding climate change, sustainability and human survival.
Marta Crivos (CONICET-UNLP)
Paper short abstract:
We present an intersectoral reflection to identify those issues related to the changes the natural and social environments are suffering, and to search for ways of fostering the sustainable development of practices and resources at the local and global levels.
Paper long abstract:
We present a fresh acknowledgement of information regarding the perception and the use of components of the natural environment in terms of routine activities carried out by the inhabitants of a rural community in the Calchaqui Valley (Salta, Argentina).
Life in this community is characterized by the presence of traditional subsistence activities -agriculture, cattle farming, textile manufacturing, and ancestral medical practices- coexisting with business ventures focused on monoculture and export, tourism centred on landscape intervention and the promotion of native products, and the growing key role of public policies in the areas of health and human development.
In this context, a joint reflection on viability and sustainability of local and global practices and resources must be undertaken. Implementing intersectoral forums and focus group discussions, governmental and non-governmental actors, researchers and natives must work conjointly to achieve a fresh patrimonial awareness of livelihood strategies based on their long interaction with a specific environment.
This interaction will help identify those issues related to the rapid changes in social and natural environments and search for ways of fostering the sustainable development of the resources involved in activities regarding the identity and the subsistence of the local community.
Debarati Sen (Kennesaw State University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I show how the idea and practice of Fair Trade informs women’s situated empowerment sensibilities in Darjeeling as they participate in their own community’s Fair Trade certification through internal community inspections.
Paper long abstract:
Fair Trade is a market based social justice movement that aims to address the inadequacies of conventional global trade by empowering marginalized producers through creating sustainable links between reflexive Western consumer activists and Southern producers. In its unfolding, Fair Trade has myriad articulations in local communities, ranging from strengthening patriarchal projects of dominating women's labor to becoming a resource for women's activism against such tendencies. In this paper I show how the idea and practice of Fair Trade informs women's situated empowerment sensibilities in Darjeeling as they participate in their own community's Fair Trade certification through internal community inspections. Based on over six years of ethnographic research in Darjeeling, India, I argue that these community certification processes enable women farmers to disassemble and reassemble the tenets of the global Fair Trade initiative to concretize their situated aspirations of economic justice.
Sam Beck (Cornell University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on sustaining a self-identifying Latino group in North Brooklyn whose life ways are at a stage of disintegration and whose residential presence in a Brooklyn “neighborhood” is increasingly vulnerable due to factors usually glossed as “gentrification and displacement.”
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on sustaining a self-identifying Latino group in North Brooklyn whose life ways are at a stage of disintegration and whose residential presence in a Brooklyn "neighborhood" is increasingly vulnerable due to factors usually glossed as "gentrification and displacement." The paper analyzes the tactics employed by local religious and political elites to "divide and conquer" a primarily Latino and Roman Catholic population, whose efforts to unite in the face of rising housing costs and alter the political scene were thwarted; hence the need to reorganize. This paper examines strategies that advocate for affordable housing to maintain a community presence for this cultural group, but also to reproduce the kind of network that a group of progressive priests created between the 1950s and 1990s, namely a resource base that sustains a spiritual, social, cultural and, to a certain extent, economic, unity able to express itself in New York City's political scene to garner resources for community sustainability.
Carl Maida (University of California, Los Angeles)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on a community of practice of students and adult mentors, with the goal of “knowing” sustainability based upon socially defined competence and habits of mind developed through urban ecology projects that integrate a holistic perspective of Earth’s natural and human systems.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on how sustainability literacy increases through projects that integrate a holistic perspective of Earth's natural and human systems as part of secondary education. The idea of "indigenous invention" refers to a school culture that is created through local knowledge and experience, i.e., the learning environment and styles of inquiry are place-focused and rooted in community action. To this end, project-based learning involving students as collaborators in the creation of curricular goals and outcomes takes place at High Tech High, San Diego where an ongoing project uses San Diego Bay as an outdoor laboratory to understand regional urban ecology. Teachers and students design their learning experiences and develop strong local partnerships with academic, industrial, and non-profit sector stakeholders in a continuing community-based conservation program on behalf of the Bay. Student researchers use photography, interviewing, mapping, drawing, and journaling, together with ecological surveys and DNA barcoding for identification of invasive species, to develop an understanding of their surroundings and self-awareness of their place within them. Through learning in the field and the classroom, students begin to make connections about the complexity of the local environment, and the need to care for it. Students produce a book on a specific topic about the San Diego Bay, including historical ecology and conservation practices, which integrates cartography, humanities, biology, and art. This community of practice among students and their adult mentors holds the promise of "knowing" sustainability based upon socially defined competence and habits of mind grounded in accomplishment and personal responsibility.
Krista Harper (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Paper short abstract:
This research project explores how people in Lisbon, Portugal, are transforming urban space through gardening, and how gardeners interpret their own practice. I present the history and contemporary terrain of Lisbon's urban gardens and then discuss the cultural values that gardeners attach to the practice of growing food in interstitial urban spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Voltaire's novella Candide begins with the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and ends in a garden, with the protagonist telling his companions, "we must cultivate our gardens." For over 250 years, Candide's words present an enigma--do they represent a retreat into private life, or a call to dig into the work of transforming the world from the ground up? These questions also animate research on urban agriculture in 21st century cities: do gardens represent a political retreat or a new practice of "civic ecology"? This research project explores how people in Lisbon, Portugal, are transforming urban space through gardening, and how gardeners interpret their own practice. I present the history and contemporary terrain of Lisbon's urban gardens and then discuss the cultural values that gardeners attach to the practice of growing food in interstitial urban spaces. Finally, I will address several of the panel's overarching questions, such as: What kinds of urban gardening practices produce "communities of practice" that cross ethnic, socioeconomic, and generational lines? What visions of sustainability and the contemporary city emerge from the practice of urban gardening? How has the global financial crisis affected gardeners' lives and the meaning of urban agriculture? How can anthropological research engagements can go beyond documenting and criticizing citizens' projects for socially just and environmentally sustainable cities?
Sandy Smith-Nonini (University of North Carolina)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss lessons learned from a self-supporting co-op in Durham, North Carolina (USA) that combines environmental education with a workshop and marketplace for upcyclers. The question driving the Recyclique co-op has been how to promote sustainability education to a broad public while addressing the need to make green lifestyles accessible for underemployed people. We chose a synergistic social enterprise approach rather than a traditional non-profit model.
Paper long abstract:
Most approaches to social justice-oriented green job creation in the US emulate urban agriculture models and tend to be grant dependent in early years. Our co-op grew out of production and marketing of upcycled rain barrels. In 2011 we opened a shop shared with other upcyclers, crafters and vintage vendors which sponsors educational events -- most with a strong skill-share component, and engages in community education collaborations. I will discuss the stepping stones to this venture which originated through a homeowner energy conservation initiative, followed by alliance-building with non-profits to promote green job creation. I will discuss complications and surprising forms of synergism that arise from the social enterprise approach, and relate it to social theory on cooperatives and community-based development models.
Richard Westra (Nagoya University)
Paper short abstract:
Green notions of LETS which hark back to writings of Adam Smith on market operations conflate two different meanings of the term “market”. To understand the role LETS may play in future economies demands treatment of this problem.
Paper long abstract:
Current global economic trends have rekindled interest in development alternatives. Green proposals for these raise important questions about crafting institutional vehicles for simultaneous realization of popular empowerment, sustainability and poverty alleviation. Much of the debate swirls around the issue of economic scale and the re-localizing of production and consumption sundered by globalization. At the center of green proposals is the local exchange and trading system (LETS). This paper argues that green notions of LETS which hark back to writings of Adam Smith on market operations conflate two different meanings of the term "market". To understand the role LETS may play in future economies demands treatment of this problem.