Citizens, Consumers and Spaces of Environmental Knowledge
Call for Papers:
RGS-IBG Conference, Manchester 26-28 August 2009
Organisers: Justin Spinney and David Evans, University of Surrey (UK)
In contemporary debates concerning potential solutions to environmental
problems, in particular climate change, the twin pillars of citizenship and
consumption are becoming ever more entwined (Slocum, 2004; Soper and
Trentmann, 2008). Accordingly governments, businesses and NGOs are
positioning the ‘citizen-consumer’ at the centre of their strategies to align the
public good of pro-environmental behaviour with the maintenance of a
consumer society. Whilst these actors and networks work to unite
environmental solutions with practices and processes of consumption; there
are those for whom the citizen consumer is a problematic figure. For instance,
there are many who argue that consumerism is not a long term solution to
environmental problems just as there are those who argue that the individual
citizen-consumer should not have to assume the responsibility for tackling
climate change and other global environmental problems. In either case,
environmental understandings are continually constructed, translated and
contested through the intersection of multiple knowledges, practices and
spaces. Of course, through these processes different actors and networks
have uneven capabilities to influence, inform and contest the ongoing
formation of the citizen-consumer.
However, particularly in sustainability and climate change literatures, a
somewhat homogenous and simplistic notion of citizenship and public goods
persists which fails to recognise the multiple ways in which being a ‘good’
citizen can be constructed, interpreted and justified in and through specific
social and cultural contexts (Shove, 2003 2008; Miller, 1998 2001). As a result
this session seeks to present more nuanced accounts of the construction and
contestation of what it is to be a citizen-consumer, and the environmental
knowledges upon which these identities and justifications are based. Papers
are welcomed that address the following:
• The formation of environmental knowledges as situated
understandings arising through specific social, cultural and institutional
contexts, e.g. domestic, work and policy spaces.
• How environmental citizenship - in particular, assuming responsibility
for the mitigation of climate change - can come into conflict with contrasting
(or for that matter, similar) ideas of being a good citizen and the ways in
which these tensions are negotiated, balanced and justified in practice.
• The ways in which different everyday social and embodied practices
articulate multiple meanings of citizenship.
• Accounts of the citizen–consumer which problematise the concept
through a focus on differences arising from gender, age, class, location etc.
• The role of government, NGOs and the media in constructing,
validating and contesting environmental knowledges and how these are
understood, translated and even resisted through the everyday practices of
(citizen) consumers.
• The formation of environmental knowledges within different sectors
of business such as product design, marketing, management and industry
analysts.
We welcome theoretical and empirical papers from a range of academic
disciplines, including geography, anthropology, sociology, history and business
studies.
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted by Friday the 6th of
February 2009 to Justin Spinney ([log in to unmask]) and David Evans
([log in to unmask])
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