Research Projects
Climate Futures and Just Transformations: Young People's Narratives and Political Imaginaries
The burden of accumulated scientific evidence unequivocally shows that climate change has profound and multifarious implications for human societies, as well as for biophysical systems, which will be aggravated in the coming decades. Its impacts, and the mitigation and adaptation measures to contain them, will especially affect people that are presently young. In Portugal and around the world, the future of young people and of other age groups will also be shaped by other sustainability-related challenges, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) and numerous analysts have highlighted the need for ‘transformative systemic change’ in order to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement and Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals. Several perspectives and proposals have emerged to address the need to foster social, economic and environmental sustainability transformations, as well as support their agents and drivers (Linner & Wibeck, 2019). Research has shown that techno-managerial discourses are dominant in the media and other public spaces, complemented by discourses focusing on individual change (Carvalho et al., 2018). However, transformations towards sustainability are eminently political, with power, justice and redistributive issues at their core. Pluralism and contestation are critical to overcome a post-political ambiance and to re-politicize the Anthropocene, namely by exposing and debating divergent visions of socio-ecological futures (Lövbrand et al., 2015). Recent mobilisations around climate change have clearly indicated that young people are or want to be involved in climate change debates and futures. The JUSTFUTURES project will contribute to understanding young people's agency and political imaginaries. It will do so by mapping existing collective action groups, analysing narratives and media(ted) discourses of climate futures and examining, through extensive field work, young people...
Project Information
2021-03-29
2024-03-28
Project Partners
Negotiating Livelihoods under transformative politics: crisis, policies and practices in Portugal 2008-2018
In the last decade Portugal had three governments with very different political orientations and proposals for the legislative organization of society, each one claiming to initiate a process of transformative politics that would have a positive impact upon Portuguese society. Social policies, legislation on labor, health, education, housing and security have been profoundly altered with each legislative change, impacting in different ways upon the institutions concerned and upon people’s lives. Furthermore, the economic crisis has engendered a crisis in the European model, which are inter-related and reveal a breakdown of social reproduction which puts into question redistribution models both at the macro (market, State), meso (mediating institutions and actors) and micro-scales of social interaction (families, social networks). LIVEPOLITICS focus on the different ways citizens experience the policies which govern their lives in a daily basis, how they implement them and what kind of negotiations can take place in the framework of moral economies. Through a detailed examination of the ways by which specific actors in diverse sectors of society experience legislation and policy orientations through a range of institutions, this project focuses on how perceptions of the legitimacy of policies emerge through policy implementation and negotiation within a wider analytical context of the workings moral economies. The project will focus on: 1) Livelihoods, policies, everyday life strategies; 2) Grassroots economics – definition, value and care regimes, interpretation and ways out of crisis; 3) Public policies, from conception, implementation and impact upon institutions and citizens. The project aims at reflecting on how different sectors of the Portuguese society experience their livelihoods through a permanent relation with state institutions throughout a decade of profound sociopolitical transformations. The strategies to overcome difficulties of provision under an au...
Project Information
2018-09-01
2022-08-31
Project Partners