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- Convenors:
-
Owe Ronström
(Ethnology)
Carina Johansson (Uppsala University Campus Gotland)
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- Chair:
-
Owe Ronström
(Ethnology)
- Discussants:
-
Swaminathan Ramanathan
(Uppsala University)
Gurbet Peker (Uppsala University)
Anders Häggström (Uppsala)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- SUSTAINABILITIES
- Location:
- Room H-204
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel examines how sustainability is articulated, negotiated and fixated in concrete, everyday practices in local contexts, and how sustainability narratives interact with, reinforce, challenge or radically transform already established narratives and practices in different social areas.
Long Abstract:
Sustainability is now firmly established as one of today's most productive and important concepts. It is a powerful concept, difficult and ambiguous, with a pronounced moral, ethical and political charge, which makes it useful to many, but at the same time contributes to increased uncertainty about what it is. By being used so often, by so many, for so many reasons, sustainability has become increasingly ambiguous and multivalent, which in turn will most probably further increase its scope and strengthen its moral, ethical and political charge and power.
Like 'progress' and 'modernity', 'sustainability' is a concept that begs to be translated into stories, with a beginning, complication, resolution and end. In this panel we examine the stories people tell about their struggles to establish everyday practices and ways of life that can be understood as sustainable. Through studies of concrete, local contexts where sustainability is articulated, negotiated and fixated, we strive to come to grips with how sustainability narratives interact with already established narratives and practices in different social areas, how they may reinforce, challenge or radically transform them:
• • When and how is sustainability activated, articulated, and fixed? In what kind of stories and narrative modes? How are such stories structured? How is sustainability constituted, represented?
• • Who are the actors? How are roles and positions distributed? How are time and space, cause and effect arranged?
• How does sustainability relate to and interact with other "grand narratives", about progress, modernity, capitalism, peace, cultural heritage, etc.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Sustainability is a concept deeply entrenched in narrative. The presentation discusses sustainability as narrative from a theoretical perspective, with a focus on articulations, temporalities, potential spaces, shifts and narrative projects.
Paper long abstract:
Sustainability is now firmly established as one of today's most productive and important concepts, a hub and engine for utopias as well as dystopias, in society at large as well as in Academia. Like 'progress' and 'modernity', 'sustainability' and 'sustainable development' are figures of thought that already in themselves beg to be translated into stories, with a beginning, complication, resolution and end, and to that a clear moral point: sustainability is good, therefore sustainability will prevail.
Just like a number of other “grand” concepts, such as peace, democracy, cultural heritage, development and progress, sustainability has become a ‘floating signifier’ (Laclau 1990: 28), filled with many and often conflicting meanings. But at the same time, it is also in many ways a unique and different concept, not least because its moral charge is based on insights about the biosphere as a fixed and non-negotiable external boundary for human living space on earth (Rockström et al 2009, Steffen et al 2015).
In recent years interest in sustainability and narrative has been particularly fueled by a growing "information deficit" (Veland et al. 2018), an increasingly dramatic gap between research and action. Narrative is assigned a crucial role in bridging this gap between science and everyday life.
Paper short abstract:
This research project explores the sheep as a cultural conception and symbol of sustainabilities. The study focuses on how the sheep influences narratives and everyday practices on the island of Gotland.
Paper long abstract:
The sheep constitutes a clear symbol of the island of Gotland and the Gotlandic countryside. In addition to decorate the official symbol of the region, the sheep has a unique position within marketing, handicraft, local food, cultural heritage, art and local narratives about sustainable lifestyles on the island. The sheep are therefore of great importance in narratives as well as in people’s everyday practices on Gotland. This research project aims to explore practices, narratives and other representations on the island that all associate with the sheep. Ethnographic fieldwork with interviews and observations forms the basis of the data collection in this study. The project explores questions such as: How is the sheep (re)produced as a cultural conception? When and how are sheep used in narratives about sustainable lifestyles? Which alternative narratives are (re)produced in this context? How are sheep used in the marketing of the island as a tourist destination? What kinds of meaning-making processes related to the sheep are articulated and practiced among the inhabitants of Gotland?
Paper short abstract:
Starting from a small-scale fishing community, we will be able to reflect on the economic and political contradictions of ocean sustainability, and the importance of different narratives as well as scale in this discussion.
Paper long abstract:
In the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, the issue of sustainability of the seas and oceans has been increasingly discussed within the scope of other environmental concerns linked to adaptation to climate change and energy transition. In these speeches, several paradoxes question the sustainability they intend to achieve.
Several actors with different agendas push for a different kind of ocean sustainability: some lobbying for economic activities as resource extraction and aquaculture, or, in the case of activists, ocean conservation achieved by minimal human interactions. This paper intends to analyze these contradictions within sustainability discourses, but mostly to reflect on the role of Humans in the sustainability of oceans, starting from an ethnography within a small-scale fishing community in Portugal, which seems to be doomed to disappear, while its daily life still retains narratives of essential traditional knowledge for a sustainable balance of the ecosystem.
Through ethnography, it is possible to know how this community relates to the environment and how it adapts to challenges exacerbated by climate change and socioeconomic tensions. In this discussion of ocean sustainability, the scale seems to be a key element since narratives of economic growth are still a great driver in the broader political agendas, with local consequences. Considering these issues, and narratives of local fishermen, we can deconstruct what local sustainability is, and possible paths to achieve it.
Paper short abstract:
A vision for most companies is to incorporate “sustainability” into operational activities. But a company needs to translate the general and sometimes conflicting UN's global goals into their everyday practices. What stories are told about these translations, dilemmas, choices and best practices?
Paper long abstract:
A vision for most companies is to incorporate “sustainability” into everyday operational activities. But a company needs to translate the general, rather abstract, and sometimes conflicting UN's global goals for economic, ecological, social and cultural sustainability into their everyday practices. What stories are told about these translations, dilemmas, choices and best practices? This paper discusses how five interviewees, who are owners/CEOs of small, peripherally located companies in sparsely populated areas in Sweden, narrate sustainability practices in their companies. Some of these companies are world leading in their industry/niche. The empirical data consists of semi-structured interviews that are analysed from a narrative perspective. In the interviews, sustainability in these small, and yet internationally active, companies is narrated as an implicit part of the way of life that permeates the northern locality, or even their family traditions. Thus, a concern for “sustainability” is present in everything that is done. The presentation discusses the interviewees’ stories about local and global challenges, dilemmas, failures, best practices and innovative solutions for sustainable organizing. The stories also problematize responsibility, work ethic, and professional pride. There is a negotiation between different narrative plots and possible evaluations of what is reasonable and justifiable in ambiguous economic, social, cultural, political, and ideological circumstances. By applying strategies of e.g. generalisation, categorisation, and particularisation, the narrators depict their own choices and actions in a proud, ambivalent, defensive etc. ways; they reproduce, challenge, mock and attack dominant cultural narratives, and present themselves as understandable, rational and moral persons and managers.