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"SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION"
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Fragments of Solidarity
How is solidarity understood by the people who practice it actively and daily? What is the role of solidarity in reconciling the relationship of individuals with the collective demands of communities that fight for the rights of others? Based on a variety of anthropological, sociological, and philosophical writings as well as ethnographic research, Maria Giannoula takes an elaborated look at the emotional and spiritual aspects of political participation within an activist group in Greece in the 2010s. This study is a valuable resource for those researching social movements and alternative communities, focusing on the ways in which individuals organise their own forms of activism.
eBook
The server : a media history from the present to the Baroque
Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current-day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants' relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.
Book
The Sustainable Development Goals prioritize economic growth over sustainable resource use: a critical reflection on the SDGs from a socio-ecological perspective
The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015, succeeding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While the MDGs focused on improving well-being in the developing world, the 17 SDGs address all countries and aim at reconciling economic and social with ecological goals. We adopt a social ecology perspective and critically reflect on the SDGs’ potential for monitoring, supporting, and bringing about a transformation towards sustainability. Starting from a literature review on the SDGs, we link empirical findings from social ecology with analyses of SDG targets and indicators. First, we find that the SDGs fail to monitor absolute trends in resource use and thus prioritize economic growth over ecological integrity. Second, we discuss the contradictions between economic growth and sustainable resource use in early and late stages of industrialization processes and show that they are responsible for important trade-offs among SDG targets. Third, we analyze the transformative potential of the SDGs with a focus on the actors and institutions addressed to bring about transformative change. We find that the SDGs rely mainly on those institutions responsible for unsustainable resource use, and partly propose measures that even reinforce current trends towards less sustainability. Despite ascertaining limited transformative potential to the SDGs from an analytical perspective, we conclude by stressing the strategic relevance of the SDGs for visions, research, and practices of statt towards transformative change towards sustainability.
Journal Article
Energy efficient data aggregation and improved prediction in cooperative surveillance system through Machine Learning and Particle Swarm based Optimization
The present pandemic demands touchless and autonomous, intelligent surveillance system to reduce human involvement. Heterogeneous types of sensors are used to improve the effectiveness of this surveillance system and a cooperative approach of such sensors will make the system further efficient due to variation in users such as corporate office, universities, manufacturing industries etc. The application of effective data aggregation technique on sensors is essential as the energy utilization of the system degrades the lifetime, coverage and computational overhead. The application of bio-inspired optimization technique like Particle Swarm Optimization for scheduling leads to improved performance of the system as the nature of the system is heterogeneous and requirement is multi-objective. Similarly the application of Support vector Machine as a classification and prediction algorithm on the huge data collected periodically makes the system further autonomous and intelligent.
Journal Article
A theory of migration: the aspirations-capabilities framework
This paper elaborates an aspirations–capabilities framework to advance our understanding of human mobility as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social change. In order to achieve a more meaningful understanding of agency and structure in migration processes, this framework conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within given sets of perceived geographical opportunity structures. It distinguishes between the instrumental (means-to-an-end) and intrinsic (directly wellbeing-affecting) dimensions of human mobility. This yields a vision in which moving and staying are seen as complementary manifestations of migratory agency and in which human mobility is defined as people’s capability to choose where to live, including the option to stay, rather than as the act of moving or migrating itself. Drawing on Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty (as manifestations of the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs) this paper conceptualises how macro-structural change shapes people’s migratory aspirations and capabilities. The resulting framework helps to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and ‘development’ shape patterns of migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework.
Journal Article
Implementing Sustainability Co-Creation between Universities and Society: A Typology-Based Understanding
Universities are under mounting pressure to partner with societal stakeholders and organizations to collaboratively create and implement sustainability-advancing knowledge, tools, and societal transformations. Simultaneously, an increasing number of societal organizations are reaching out to partner with universities to achieve organizational objectives and increase the effectiveness of strategies to further societal sustainability. Using a conceptual framework of “sustainability co-creation”, this study empirically examines the historical and ongoing experiences of five organizations in Japan that actively partner with universities to enhance sustainability activities and strategies to transform society. We examine motivations for partnering with universities, innovative models of practice, factors hampering the co-creative potential of the university, and desired changes to overcome these. Our empirical study leads to the proposal of a typology that might assist in categorizing and understanding key attributes of differing types of sustainability co-creation. We build our typology from two perspectives: First, in terms of the primary objective of the co-creation (ranging from knowledge production to the transformation of society), and second, in terms of the approach taken (ranging from either socially or technologically-centered). We then reflect on the organizations’ experiences to offer several strategies that could increase the effectiveness of the university when partnering with stakeholders in sustainability co-creation. We also highlight several factors effecting the university’s capacity to move beyond knowledge production towards implementation measures to transform society with external stakeholders.
Journal Article
Pierre Bourdieu on social transformation, with particular reference to political and symbolic revolutions
This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectively
synchronized
across fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements.
Journal Article
The Impact Of Social Partnership On The Environment
The multidimensional social problems that everyone seeks to remedy them are very complex and no actor can confront them on their own. So the different parties have to work together by creating relations of partnerships.The State has long been the main actor in the control and regulation of social relations. However, in recent years there has been a rapid decline in their role given the enormous charge and lack of resources. Hence the need for the intervention of other parties.Some review of literature explores the conceptualization of social partnership in order to meet the needs of the organization or solve organizational problems. More and more large companies and multinationals get started on a voluntary approach to social responsibility and have begun to move closer to certain social enterprises by concluding partnership agreements.The purpose of this study was to study the social transformation that follows the creation of a relation of a social partnership between a social enterprise and a company that has involved a strategy of social responsibility. Then, we will present the environment to finally study the impact of social partnership on the environment; on economic, cultural and political dimensions.
Journal Article
From Transition to Domains of Transformation: Getting to Sustainable and Just Food Systems through Agroecology
The acceleration of ecological crises has driven a growing body of thinking on sustainability transitions. Agroecology is being promoted as an approach that can address multiple crises in the food system while addressing climate change and contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond the more technical definition as, “the ecology of food systems”, agroecology has a fundamentally political dimension. It is based on an aspiration towards autonomy or the agency of networks of producers and citizens to self-organize for sustainability and social justice. In this article, we use the multi-level perspective (MLP) to examine agroecology transformations. Although the MLP has been helpful in conceptualizing historic transitions, there is a need to better understand: (a) the role of and potential to self-organize in the context of power in the dominant regime, and (b) how to shift to bottom-up forms of governance—a weak point in the literature. Our review analyzes the enabling and disabling conditions that shape agroecology transformations and the ability of communities to self-organize. We develop the notion of ‘domains of transformation’ as overlapping and interconnected interfaces between agroecology and the incumbent dominant regime. We present six critical domains that are important in agroecological transformations: access to natural ecosystems; knowledge and culture; systems of exchange; networks; discourse; and gender and equity. The article focuses on the dynamics of power and governance, arguing that a shift from top down technocratic approaches to bottom up forms of governance based on community-self organization across these domains has the most potential for enabling transformation for sustainability and social justice.
Journal Article