After last night’s keynote, tonight it was the turn of Professor Ingolfur Blühdorn, Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, WU Vienna to deliver a talk. His title was “The Resilience of Unsustainability: Cultural Backlash, Authoritarian Reflex and the Great Regression,” which is academic-speak for “Dudes, lemme say, we’re, like, totes fubarred” This blog post gives... Continue Reading →
Video Vox Pop – how I would do it, fwiw.
Recently I proposed that an organisation (I am a FIFO activist on this) organise some video vox pops around an event that they’re organising for about five weeks’ time. This post is how I would do it. (Or rather, how I like to believe that I would be able to do it. By now, pushing... Continue Reading →
Must the tail always wag the dog? Of activism and strategy.
Thinking strategically is very very hard. The normal activist mode is to move (or, uncharitably, lurch) from one ‘crucial’/urgent; upcoming event to the next. It might be a camp, or a march, or a submission to some government ‘consultation’. It might be a public meeting, the launch of a document, whatevs. You can spend literally... Continue Reading →
What we knew on #climate in 1971… #auspol
A couple of years ago the folks at the Conversation asked me to bash out a piece on what Australians knew about climate change in the late 60s, early 70s. I did an okay-ish job, but have since radically expanded my knowledge of that period. What we have below is not the first mention of... Continue Reading →
Can we see right? With C. Wright, maybe…
I'm going through my unread gmail messages, tracking down notes to myself about the four empirical chapters of The Thesis (which is all but done). And I'm stumbling on stuff that I always intended to blog/think more about. Here's one (should probably turn into a video!) "The first rule for understanding the human condition is... Continue Reading →
#climate justice or just us? Of learning, time machines and the “what should have been done”#AFoI2018
May as well put cards on the table. I think we’re fubarred. I think that we’ve now left it “too late” and a grim meathook future is all we have to look forward too. There is probably still time to learn a bunch of new skills, use our technology specifically to soften the coming climate blows. ... Continue Reading →
Brilliant facilitation “patch” at #AFoI2018
Sometimes small tweaks can have big impacts, and can sidestep showdowns with the powerful and their (often) big brittle egos… At the Adelaide Festival of Ideas (of which more later) today, I saw a brilliant little facilitation trick/hack/patch/whatevs (1). It’s so simple, so elegant and – today at least – so effective that I’m a... Continue Reading →
Of manels, transitions and Ottawa. #IST2018 and #IST2019
The organisers of #IST2018 have worked extremely hard, and pulled together what has already been an interesting and thought-provoking programme (with a day and a half still to come). Barring a few things in the conference programme (the floor 1 and 4 switcheroo), it's been a well-oiled machine - in part thanks to the affable... Continue Reading →
Field mobilization and how little we know… #PhD
Really really wish I'd gotten better hold of the institutional theory leg of this stool (chair?) that is my thesis earlier in the process. Am good enough on the policy stuff (MSA, PE, ACF etc etc), and the empirics, and even the sociotech transitions stuff. But I wasn't deep, wide and overview-y enough on institutional... Continue Reading →
Something fishy in the lake: of politics and power
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening The old saw goes 'give a man a fish and you have fed him for a... Continue Reading →
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