IMIC: Imaginaries in Crisis

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The language of crisis has become ubiquitous in contemporary sustainability discourse, associated with the proliferation of termssuch as 'climate emergency'; 'tipping points'; 'catastrophic threat' and 'societal collapse'. While the political effects, and governanceimplications of crisis framings in the context of specific sustainability issues have been long recognized and critiqued, there has beenlittle systematic attention paid to the relationship between crisis and the collective imagination more broadly. In the absence ofsufficient theorising of these dynamics, there is a risk that sustainability discourse and practice becomes complicit in closing downimaginative spaces of possibility through allowing crisis thinking to dominate the map of possibilities. Empirically grounded in thecontext of imaginaries of agricultural transformation in the Galapagos Islands, the present project seeks to examine the ways in whichcrisis narratives shape imaginaries of sustainability, and with what implications. The project will bring together STS scholarship onsociotechnical imaginaries, feminist and decolonial scholarship on the politics of crisis, and insights from affect theory, with a view todeepening conceptual understanding of the relationship between narratives of crisis and imaginaries of possible futures, andcontributing to academic and policy debates around 'transformations to sustainability' in Galapagos and beyond. In the tradition ofsustainability action-research, the proposed project sets out to learn from and intervene in Galapagos context: to build theoreticalinsights with broad academic and societal relevance 'from the ground up' through detailed ethnographic fieldwork with diverseactors working to re-imagine agriculture in Galapagos at the confluence of multiple narratives of crisis; and to open up 'spaces ofpossibility' for imagining sustainable food futures in the archipelago.