On the 1st and 2nd of July 2024, ahead of the 30th International Conference of Europeanists at the École normale supérieure (ENS) de Lyon, France, the Council’s Research Network on Social Movements hosted a pre-conference event that gathered 19 participants from 11 countries. As co-chair of this network, alongside the other organizers, I was thrilled to see how the event fostered meaningful discussions on the methodological, ethical, and political challenges social movement scholars face today. These challenges are especially pressing given that many scholars in this field are also activists or militants, navigating the complexities that such dual roles entail. Social movement research has grown into a vital space for examining social and political conflict, evolving from theoretical debates to practical approaches that shape our understanding of mobilization.
Foi a partir do apagão no fornecimento de eletricidade, ocorrido em 2001 e resultante da seca que afetou o Brasil, que a produção de energias renováveis foi desenvolvida. Ainda nesse ano, o Governo Federal avançou com o Programa Emergencial de Energia Eólica (PROEÓLICA), substituído no ano seguinte pelo Programa de Incentivo às Fontes Alternativas (PROINFA). Data também de 2001 o primeiro Atlas de Potencial Eólico Brasileiro, que mostrou que o Nordeste tem os ventos mais favoráveis à produção eólica. Em 2006, foi publicado o Atlas Brasileiro de Energia Solar, destacando igualmente o potencial produtivo do Nordeste. A implementação de empreendimentos eólicos tem sido muito rápida, enquanto que a produção de energia solar está ainda em fase de expansão.
Por: Lanka Horstink, Kaya Schwemmlein e Gabriela Abrahão Masson
Nota: por opção das autoras, este texto não segue o acordo ortográfico.
O presente post apresenta um resumo dos resultados de uma análise crítica comparativa das políticas fundiárias nos sistemas agro-alimentares de duas regiões rurais marginalizadas em dois países de continentes diferentes com uma história interligada: Portugal e Brasil. A apresentação completa dos estudos de caso e da análise da “qualidade de soberania da terra” pode ser encontrada aqui (em inglês).
Nos últimos anos, as finanças globais, a procura de recursos em sectores como a energia e alimentação e a necessidade de mitigar as alterações climáticas alteraram profundamente as agendas de desenvolvimento sustentável. Esta transformação trouxe desafios interligados, como a concentração de recursos e a monopolização de elementos essenciais, como a água, a terra, a energia e a agricultura (e.g., Dunlap, 2024). Investigadores, como Borras e Franco (2012) e GRAIN (2016), destacaram a natureza multifacetada destes problemas.
I learned about songlines during my PhD, when I was eager to get to know participatory methods that would take people to the “depths of things” and provide “real participation” – that’s when I came across Dragon Dreaming. Fascinated by its holistic approach and its three principles – personal empowerment, community building and service to the Earth – I took several courses to learn more about it, and thereby I also learned a bit about Aborigines’ philosophies and worldviews, an important inspiration in Dragon Dreaming.
About songlines
Margo Ngawa Neale, adjunct professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Indigenous History and senior manager at the National Museum of Australia, describes songlines as libraries that store knowledge critical to survival: these songlines, also called dreaming tracks, are sacred routes in Aboriginal culture, passed down through generations. They represent pathways across the land, guiding people physically and spiritually along distant walks and helping them find, for example, landmarks and water sources. As Aboriginal people walk these paths, they sing the land into being, reinforcing their deep relationship with it. The songs carry vital information from ancient narratives shared among different language groups, facilitating cross-cultural understanding and a perception of the land not just as a resource but as a living entity with which humans and other-than-humans are deeply intertwined.
I was thrilled to discover an exhibition on Songlines at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris during a family trip last year. The project behind the exhibition was started by Aboriginal elders, aiming to preserve the stories of the Seven Sisters for future generations and to raise awareness of songlines more broadly. Walking through the artworks, I felt a glimpse of the cultural richness of one of the oldest Indigenous cultures—dating back approximately 60 000 years ago—and their profound connection to the more-than-human world (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Impression of the exhibition Songlines, Musée du Quai Branly Jaques Chirac, Paris (Photographs and collage by author)
The concept of songlines stayed with me and resurfaced as I explored relational approaches in sustainability research and education—a growing area of interest among scholars. I have highlighted just a few sources to introduce some key ideas being discussed in this field, and invite you to reflect on how these relational approaches might connect to the Aboriginal songlines.
Is there a relational turn in sustainability science?
This question was asked in an article by Simon West and colleagues in 2020, who emphasize relational approaches as being more holistic and dynamic analyses of human-nature connectedness. They hold the potential to open new domains and approaches for sustainability interventions that nurture relationships in place and practice. In the same year, Zack Walsh and colleagues called for action for sustainability researchers to co-develop a research agenda for advancing this relational paradigm within sustainability research, practice, and education.
Why a relational paradigm?
The emergence of a relational paradigm stems from the need to address shortcomings in previous sustainability science approaches that have mainly focused on impact reduction and resource optimisation through technology advancements as the main road to change. These approaches have fostered dualistic rather than relational understandings by addressing certain elements of the system without addressing the intrinsic relations between them. While sustainability science often emphasizes the interaction between system elements, the relational approach emphasises continually unfolding processes and relations among entities. Similar terms and concepts, such as the ecological paradigm or systems approach, metamodernism, constructive postmodernism, and new materialism, exist both within and outside sustainability-related discourses.
“Walking together in a world of many worlds”
This is the subtitle of the latest publication of West et al. (2024) who have further systematized relational approaches and mapped their overlaps and differences, organized in five intersecting areas: (i) Indigenous-kinship relationalities, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) posthumanist-performative, (iv) structural-metabolic, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment (Figure 2). The authors conclude that the diversity of these relationalities “gives rise to practices of transformations as ‘walking together in a world of many worlds’ and support intercultural dialogue on sustainability transformations”.
Figure 2: Relational approaches to sustainability transformations in sustainability science (West et al. 2024, article under open access and Creative Commons CC BY license).
What about a relational turn in (higher) education?
Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas and Joan Tronto published an inspiring book about Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies that is based on relational ethics. The contributions to this book consider the various ways in which posthuman and care ethics might open more fruitful ways of reconsidering the ways in which higher education pedagogies are enacted and how they might be differently perceived in the current circumstances of educators and researchers teaching in universities.
Developing “songlines” for transformative research and education?
While relational discourses may seem abstract and theoretical, they hold significant practical potential. I propose using songlines as a metaphor to open new pathways for fostering connections with places and all forms of life.
Songlines can serve as a powerful educational tool, where young people learn about geography, ecology, and culture through direct engagement with the land. In a similar way, relational sustainability in education promotes experiential learning, helping students understand the intricate relationships between natural systems, human societies, and the broader environment.
Songlines represent a form of living knowledge, passed down through generations, offering wisdom on how to care for the land. Relational sustainability also embraces multiple ways of knowing, encouraging us to draw from diverse disciplines and cultural traditions, including Indigenous wisdom, to deepen our understanding of how to coexist sustainably with the natural world.
“If you stay connected, you will stay knowledgeable.”Margo Ngawa Neale about songlines
Antje Disterheft is an inter- and transdisciplinary researcher in the fields of sustainability transformation and education. She joined ICS as a team member of the Shared Green Deal. Central to her investigation are transformative processes that question the status quo and challenge current societal paradigms of knowledge production and learning.
Por: Jussara Rowland, Ana Delicado, e Clara Venâncio
Zines Académicas: Porquê e para Quê?
No nosso post anterior, sobre a relevância de experimentar novos formatos de disseminação, debruçámo-nos sobre a criação de um desdobrável, em formato de “quantos queres”, no âmbito do projeto de investigação Engage IoT – Envolvimentos sociais com a Internet das Coisas (EXPL/SOC-SOC/1375/2021), mencionando a sua articulação com uma zine. Mas, afinal, o que são as zines?
As zines, termo derivado de fanzines e ascendente de e-zines, são publicações não oficiais, produzidas de forma independente, mais ou menos artesanal, sobre temas variados. Originadas nos anos 1930 junto dos entusiastas da ficção científica, as zines ganharam sucesso a partir dos anos 1970 nos movimentos ativistas punk e da música alternativa, e dos anos 1990 no movimento underground feminista Riot Grrrl. Tradicionalmente associadas a culturas DIY, movimentos sociais e artísticos, as zines têm como principal função a disseminação de ideias e a partilha de informações fora dos circuitos convencionais.
The rapidly multiplying and intensifying socio-ecological-economic crises are merging into a polycrisis: ‘a single, macro-crisis of interconnected, runaway failures of Earth’s vital natural and social systems that irreversibly degrades humanity’s prospects’ (Homer-Dixon et al.). As a result, new questions are finally being asked in more and more arenas related to shaping the present and future of urbanisation across the world: What if biodiversity, climate and equality were the core global priorities? What if all life mattered? What if we recognised that we co-exist and share the space in our cities with other-than-human species?
Under the golden hour light, the green of the trees seems deeper and magical. It sparkles. We walk silently up a path covered with leaves from last Autumn’s season. There are footprints from wild boars, and we all bend to watch them closely, a mix of curiosity and fascination. We finally settle near a path leading to a thicker grove of trees. Ricardo Brandão, the coordinator of CERVAS, the Centro de Ecologia, Recuperação e Vigilância de Animais Selvagens, in Gouveia (central Portugal), lays down the box he carries. Inside, a small tawny owl crouches in motionless silence. This member of the Strix aluco family arrived at CERVAS a couple of months before, injured, where he was cared for by the center’s team. What does it mean to take care of another living being so that recovery from trauma and disaster is possible? How can we look into the marvel of another living being in their recovery process? How can we turn the awe we feel into humble learning?
O Serviço Social brasileiro apresenta uma relação extremamente próxima com o desenvolvimento das políticas urbanas, sobretudo aquelas que se propõem a enfrentar o déficit habitacional do país, estimado em torno de seis milhões de domicílios, conforme os dados da Fundação João Pinheiro referentes ao ano de 2022. Não há dúvidas que o problema da moradia no país atinge os segmentos mais pauperizados da classe trabalhadora. Dentre eles, destacam-se as mulheres e a população negra, que compõem 54% da população.
Assim, a questão urbana no Brasil engloba uma complexidade de problemas que se articulam entre si. A ausência de regularização da posse da terra, o crescimento das favelas, a insuficiente e ineficaz mobilidade urbana, a falta de assistência técnica de interesse social, o crescimento das milícias policiais mediando a vida nos territórios, as guerras dos grupos civis armados, a política de segurança pública equivocada e, por fim, a negação do direito à cidade nos termos defendidos por Henri Lefebvre, são alguns exemplos que podemos citar. É justamente no conjunto dessas das expressões da questão social – termo usual da categoria profissional – que os assistentes sociais brasileiros executam seu trabalho.
O governo eleito instalado no Brasil em 2023 optou por ampla agenda de ações corretivas, em meio a um ano de intensos acontecimentos climáticos, para restaurar as perdas ambientais acumuladas desde o trágico cenário de sucessivos rompimentos das barragens de resíduos metálicos, o primeiro deles em Mariana (2015), juntamente com os incêndios criminosos no Pará (Dia do Fogo, 2019), para citar aqueles com maior impacto nos media. As autoridades têm por desafio impor a justiça ambiental pelas regras draconianas de penalidades tributárias na aplicação da ordem. É complexa a conciliação entre os fundamentos do conservacionismo frente à voraz intervenção econômica ilegal por diversos biomas.
O objetivo aqui é delinear o ponto da situação ao final do primeiro ano da nova gestão do Presidente Lula, sem pesar sucessos e erros de gestão pública em tão curto prazo. São apresentadas notas fotográficas de eventos e seus atores políticos, os quais, embora distantes dos compromissos internacionais, foram confrontados pela violência de episódios ambientais e climáticos, porém agora sob a marca vencedora dos ideais democráticos que frustraram a tentativa do golpe de Estado de 8 de janeiro de 2023.
Blogue SHIFT 