Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma
John M. Meyer
Abstract
Addresses a central dilemma facing efforts to promote environmental sustainability: while environmental challenges including climate change threaten the very fabric of our lives, ambitious efforts to address these rarely resonate with the everyday concerns and ideas most pressing to citizens. The book analyzes both the opportunities and constraints facing such efforts to promote environmental sustainability. It first theorizes an approach to “contested materiality” and then draw upon this to engage values embedded in everyday material practices – including land use, automobility, and household ... More
Addresses a central dilemma facing efforts to promote environmental sustainability: while environmental challenges including climate change threaten the very fabric of our lives, ambitious efforts to address these rarely resonate with the everyday concerns and ideas most pressing to citizens. The book analyzes both the opportunities and constraints facing such efforts to promote environmental sustainability. It first theorizes an approach to “contested materiality” and then draw upon this to engage values embedded in everyday material practices – including land use, automobility, and householding – in affluent postindustrial societies. The aim is to open up new ways of thinking about property, freedom, and citizenship that might foster a more resonant and expansive political imagination, while also modeling a distinctive approach to environmental political theory.
Keywords:
environmental political theory,
material practice,
environmental sustainability,
political imagination,
property,
freedom,
citizenship
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262028905 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: September 2015 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262028905.001.0001 |
