Toward inclusive environmental sustainabilities (TIES): a theoretical framework for a counterhegemonic research agenda

Across the social sciences there is growing recognition of the need for critical analysis of Eurocentrism, as well as concrete efforts to redress its epistemic injustices (Bhambra 2023). Yet much European research on environmental sustainability remains framed by Western assumptions and pays insufficient attention to how socio-cultural differences and structural inequalities shape everyday understandings and practices (Isenhour et al 2019).
The TIES research project aims to pose fundamental challenges to Eurocentric sustainability research by centering the knowledge of migrants (specifically people who have moved from global south to global north contexts) who inhabit a unique ‘translocational position’ (Anthias 2021) from which to consider prevailing assumptions in the field. In this paper we draw on our research with Manchester residents who were born in Pakistan and Somalia to illustrate the value of translocational (‘journey-based’) knowing - as distinct from Indigenous ways of knowing - for responding to the climate crisis. Our analysis of empirical findings informs (and is informed by) a theoretical framework that we argue should guide a new agenda for counterhegemonic and inclusive sustainability scholarship. This framework consist of: i) contextualisation: foregrounding anti-migration and bordering practices in European sustainability politics; ii) symmetry: researching the attitudes and behaviours of dominant social actors alongside the marginalised to avoid othering; iii) intersectionality: analysing multiple, shifting and co-constitutive axes of social inequalities to avoid homogenisation and apolitical framings; and iv) translocational epistemology: attending to how people’s sustainability knowledge is shaped by changes in locations (i.e., by moving from one physical place in the world to another; by moving from the social position of native to migrant).