Presentation short abstract

Transformative change is hindered by unaddressed and hidden power relations. This talk presents a project creating ‘critical social science literacy tools’ to make power visible and support inter-epistemic knowledge exchange towards transformative solutions that attend to power.

Presentation long abstract

Although transformative change has been identified as the most promising path out of the polycrisis, unaddressed power relations continue to block paradigm-shifting solutions. Yet, power relations must be visible in order to address them, and the most insidious ones continue to be obscured by apolitical technocratic governance. Political ecology’s voluminous analyses illuminate the power relations embedded in the capitalist and colonial systems of environmental management that inform such governance. At the same time, epistemic diversity can complicate communication of (abstract) knowledge on power and its operations and effects, resulting in such knowledge being ‘lost in translation.’ As a result, efforts to address the power relations that underpin both epistemic and material injustices, and barriers to transformative change, are often lacking or incomplete. Meanwhile, natural scientists have a substantial ‘science literacy’ toolbox, but no such tools that facilitate inter-epistemic knowledge exchange on power appear to exist. In this talk, I present a project whose explicit goal is to design ‘critical social science literacy tools’ to illuminate hidden power dynamics. Grounded in an ex-post analysis of two Swiss-based environmental programs, we design open access tools to assist both critical social scientists in teaching power dynamics, and transformative change initiatives in integrating these concepts into their solutions. I will describe how we used our questionnaire and interview results to pinpoint areas of confusion/misunderstanding with respect to power relations, co-design our tools based on these, and field test them in workshops. In doing so, I hope to expand and amplify such efforts towards transformation.