Social Response to Environmental Change  

RCUK Academic Fellowship: Joseph Murphy

Duration: 2006-2011

Summary

The work programme associated with the RCUK Academic Fellowship in Social Response to Environmental Changes has three parts:

• Contributing to the public debate on environmental issues

Public engagement is a condition of RCUK Academic Fellowship funding and this is particularly important in relation to environmental issues. As part of the Fellowship Joseph will develop a new first year undergraduate course on Environmental Policy and Politics and before the end of the fellowship will publish this as a book for a general (non-academic) audience. Some of the chapters may appear as articles along the way, with the aim of contributing to public debate before the book is published.

• Environmental social science: towards a new meta-discipline?

Joseph intends to develop a book (with others) on environmental social science as a new meta-discipline. Since the emergence of modern environmentalism in the 1960s the social sciences have made some progress in analysing them but they have been hampered by intellectual and professional barriers. More recently, particularly since the mid-1990s, environmental social science has emerged as a new meta-discipline which overcomes many of the difficulties. The book will explore the concerns and dynamics of environmental social science.

• Governing technology for sustainability

Building on the book Governing Technology for Sustainability, Joseph hopes to contribute further to understanding of relationship between technology and society and the role that technology might play in sustainable development. This will involve extending and linking recent debates in a range of sub-disciplines of the social sciences, including ‘governance’ from policy studies and international relations, ‘transition management’ from innovation studies and ‘material culture’ from sociology and cultural studies.