دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تخیل جامعه شناختی در زمان تغییرات اقلیمی - الزویر 2018

Abstract

Despite rising calls for social science knowledge in the face of climate change, too few sociologists have been engaged in the conversations about how we have arrived at such perilous climatic circumstances, or how society can change course. With its attention to the interactive dimensions of social order between individuals, social norms, cultural systems and political economy, the discipline of sociology is uniquely positioned to be an important leader in this conversation. In this paper I suggest that in order to understand and respond to climate change we need two kinds of imagination: 1) to see the relationships between human actions and their impacts on earth’s biophysical system (ecological imagination) and 2) to see the relationships within society that make up this environmentally damaging social structure (sociological imagination). The scientific community has made good progress in developing our ecological imagination but still need to develop a sociological imagination. The application of a sociological imagination allows for a powerfully reframing of four key problems in the current interdisciplinary conversation on climate change: why climate change is happening, how we are being impacted, why we have failed to successfully respond so far, and how we might be able to effectively do so. I visit each of these four questions describing the current understanding and show the importance of the sociological imagination and other insights from the field of sociology. I close with reflections on current limitations in sociology’s potential to engage climate change and the Anthropocene.

A Call for Sociologists

Just as the interdisciplinary social science conversation has been slow to engage sociological approaches to climate inaction, the discipline of sociology has unfortunately been surprisingly silent on the implications of climate change for sociological theory and practice. As of this writing in 2017, climate change has only once been the subject of a plenary session at the American Sociological Association meetings (in 2014), was not mentioned in a Presidential address until 2016, and only a few sociologists outside of the subfield of environmental sociology have applied their expertise to the issue. We sit on the brink of the most profound social dislocation since the founding of our discipline, yet all but a few are doing “sociology as usual.” There is work to be done here as well. There are historical reasons for sociology’s short-sightedness. The discipline emerged at the height of the modernist myth that humans had overcome natural “limits.” It was presumed that the natural world was no longer a relevant influence on social outcomes (Brulle 2015). The central concern of this new discipline was to understand the novel forms of social order that were emerging with modern capitalism – especially those in the rapidly growing urban areas. Founding father Emile Durkheim specifically called for a focus on “social facts.” But as the social dimensions of climate change become evident – thanks in large part to a still modest number of environmental sociologists – the lack of attention paid to this urgent situation by mainstream sociologists is appalling. Just as those in the scientific community struggle to see social structure, it is time now for sociologists to develop an ecological imagination. Things have recently begun to change.