Mapping Political Futures: Discourses of Sustainability in the Rio+20 Debates

• In Event: 033 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. Political Discourse

Abstract

The most vibrant and meaningful political contestation is neither about the past, nor the present; it is about the future. Individual and collective actors stake claims in the public arena based on the futures that they imagine as possible and desirable – as well as in response to futures that they see as undesirable or dangerous. In this way, conflicting representations of the futures they anticipate, hope for, or fear are materialized in the present, with tangible effects on decision-making processes and the unfolding of events. However, despite their importance, futures have been understudied as a form of political discourse and representation. In this paper, we do a textual analysis of a series of positional and programmatic documents produced by collective actors in reference to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and the associated People’s Summit. We take two different approaches to textual analysis, one of which zooms in while the other zooms out. The first is based on the close reading of a small set of five documents. The second involves automated coding and computer-assisted analysis of a larger corpus of 60 documents, using natural language processing to examine temporal markers, actor categories, and future-oriented verbs and nouns. This analysis allows us to locate differences in how futures are constructed in official UN documents, in the policy statements of academic think tanks, and in the declarations and manifestos of oppositional movements.

Authors

• Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame

• Leslie Elva MacColman, University of Notre Dame

• Marshall Allen Taylor, University of Notre Dame