Welcome to TCS Extra. This section of the website has been designed to develop additional material to journal articles and the TCS books. We welcome supplementary material from authors - also video clips, podcasts, as well as commentaries and reviews, which should be sent to the TCS website email. The images in the photo gallery are taken from articles in TCS – in the past we have not been able to feature the original colour images provided by authors. We also have a number of other photographs of TCS events and the various theorists discussed in the journals and book series.
TCS Podcasts, Videos and Other Extra Material
TCS Extra: In Focus
Interview with Bron Szerszynski
In the first of a series of interviews with contributors to the TCS Special Issue on Changing Climates, Simon Dawes interviews the issue co-editor Bron Szerszynski about the relationship between social theory and climate science.
Simon Dawes: What contribution do you think social theory can make to climate change science and policy, and what can it do to actually help offset climate change?
Bron Szerszynski: There are at least two ways to answer that question. Taking it at face value would involve treating it as an instrumental question – how social theory might be able to make itself useful in the common task of mitigating and/or adapting to climate change. And of course social theory can be immensely helpful here, in offering sophisticated understandings of the nature of society and its material dimensions, of history and progress, of socio-technical change and so on. For example, the articles in the collection show how theoretical reflection about capitalism, (anti)reflexivity, socio-metabolic analysis and so on can help us to understand the social dynamics that are driving anthropogenic climate change and are making a meaningful response so difficult to achieve.
But I think Changing Climates also shows how social theory can also do something quite different, and I think quite remarkable, in that it can be used to defamiliarise our dominant ways of thinking about climate change, and to offer radically different perspectives. In this, of course, it shares some characteristics with the arts, which at their best can also disrupt familiar ways of seeing and open us up to new perceptions and new insights. I think that it’s in those moments that the real possibility of meaningful action lies. Of course, the highly politicised nature of climate change policy means that it’s hard to get this kind of intellectual and cultural labour to be given credence in policy debates, because its truth value is so different from that of the ‘hard sciences’. All too often both the social sciences and the arts are relegated to under-labourer roles – as sources of information about human behaviour on the one hand, as more effective forms of communication on the other – leaving the natural sciences as the place where all the important action happens. I hope this collection can help to alter that balance.
SD: How new is climate change as a focus of inquiry for social scientists, and why do you think economics got there before the social theorists?
BS: It’s certainly true that climate change hasn’t had the attention it deserves from social scientists, and I don’t think there’s one single reason for that. There is of course the perennial problem of social-scientific anti-naturalism, an intellectual habit that goes back to the disciplinary roots of sociology and tends to downplay the influence of nature on society. In environmental sociology and science studies there were a few people who started looking seriously at climate change early on – Simon Shackley, Brian Wynne, Steve Rayner and Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, for example. But generally even both of those sociological subdisciplines have had their own rather different preoccupations. The science of climate change is very complex, of course, but that hasn’t stopped sociologists studying other equally challenging areas.
Read the full interview here.
TCS Extra Material
Climate Change Extra Material
The American Sociological Association has recently established a "Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change," and you can find preliminary info on it here. Riley E. Dunlap has just been appointed Chair Video Recordings and Podcasts
The Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society, edited by Constance Lever-Tracy (and featuring a chapter by Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright) will be out soon – you can see the TOC here and a FLIER here.
An interview with Erik Swyngedouw on climate change
For details of the ESRC Climate Change Leadership Fellowship: Transitions in Practice
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/shove/transitionsinpractice/tip.htm
The Open University's Creative Climate project: http://www.open2.net/creativeclimate/index.html
Mike Hulme’s new inter-disciplinary climate change review journal, WIREs
See a clip of Mike Hulme discussing the science and politics of climate change on youtube
Here’s an mp3 audio download (also transcribed) of an Australian Broadcasting radio interview with Mike Hulme, discussing the psychology of climate change
For some more articles on Climate Change, go here.
Ryan Bishop interviews Joy Garnett
Joy Garnett is an artist who lives and works in New York. Her paintings, culled from news photographs, military documents and other images she gathers from the Internet, examine the apocalyptic sublime at the intersections of media, politics and culture. Garnett is a 2004 recipient of a grant from Anonymous Was a Woman, and serves as Arts Editor for the scholarly journal Cultural Politics. She is represented by Winkleman Gallery, New York City.
Other Extra Material
Mike Featherstone interviews Couze Venn on Foucault
Interview with Wang Hui
Wang Hui is a Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Dushu, an important intellectual journal in contemporary China.
Interview with Cui ZiYuan
Cui Zhiyuan is a professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is an intellectual from the Chinese New Left.
TCS Interview with Hasumi (in French)
Shigehiko Hasumi is a major Japanese film critic and also the former president of the University of Tokyo.
YouTube videos of the European Graduate School's interviews with Key Theorists
