Upping the ante: Interpreting citizen participation through situated urban research

Research output: Contribution to conferenceAbstract

Abstract

This paper answers Blühdorn’s (2017) call for responsible and theoretically-informed interpretations of the practices and self-descriptions of new participatory movements emerging in the post-democratic, post-ecologist context. My response is grounded in a research project being co-produced with a small group of community activists called ‘Upping it’ who are working to ‘clean up’ a poor, inner city neighbourhood in Moss Side, Manchester. The paper begins by sharing their story, explaining how I have come to know it, and sketching a picture of the socio-political and environmental conditions in which they operate. I then offer two possible readings, or theorizings, of this empirical case. My ‘green’ reading positions the example within what some have called ‘an environmentalism of everyday life’, a new kind of activism that offers hope for eco-political transformation. My ‘brown’ reading extracts a different message from the case, one that might be heard as evidence of a post-democratic/ecology turn, of a politics of sustaining the unsustainable, perhaps even as a form of 'cost-effective self-management of the excluded'. That two opposite yet equally persuasive interpretations of this case are possible gives rise to two claims. First, I want to claim that rather than debate which of these two interpretations is more theoretically defensible, it may be more productive to consider that both are possible due to the inherently bivalent (or Janus-faced) nature of the environmental citizen-subject created by/living with neoliberalization. Second, I argue that Blühdorn’s call for more ‘careful analyses and conceptualizations’ and better engagement with ‘socio-theoretical diagnoses’, should be enhanced by critical evaluation of how environmental academics come to know the ‘new participatory movements’ of which they write. Drawing on the work of feminist geographers, I suggest that scholarly work on ‘political participation beyond the post-democratic turn’ can only be responsible if it is a situated and reflexive practice that gets its hands dirty rather than making neat diagnoses from above. So, in addition to offering possible theoretically-informed interpretations of a specific case of actually-existing post-ecologist activism, my aim with this paper is to provoke reflection on the methodological and epistemological challenges that mess up the interpretive authority of academic analysis.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusSubmitted - 2017
EventActivation – Self-Management – Overload: Political Participation beyond the Post-democratic Turn - Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University for Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria
Duration: 27 Sept 201729 Sept 2017
http://www.theorieblog.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IGN-Vienna-CfP-Participation-Int.-Research-Workshop-Sept-2017-2.pdf

Workshop

WorkshopActivation – Self-Management – Overload
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period27/09/1729/09/17
Internet address

Research Beacons, Institutes and Platforms

  • Sustainable Consumption Institute

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