Reframing “Sociological Imagination” for 1.5°C Lifeworlds: A Reclaiming of Sociology’s Contributions to Transdisciplinary Discourses of Complexity

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Knowledge, Discourse, and the Environment

Abstract

In 2025, our planet engaged the 1.5 Celsius threshold for global warming. We live in an era of escalating geospheric dynamics that generate hurricanes, fires, floods and drought. As recognized by Dipesh Chakrabarty, climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ that is often appraised using techniques that oversimply the social and environmental complexities of global warming using ideology, unengaged social theory or computational analysis. Since the emergence of our field, sociologists have worked in tandum with scholars across the natural and social sciences to advance discourses representing the dynamics of life as processual, contingent and complex. Yet a nuanced sociological framing of complex social relations is often suppressed in accounts of global warming. In response to this dilemma, I argue for a sociologically informed vocabulary of “social complexity” acknowledging the generative processes of agency, knowledge/power and transformation. My project is motivated by pragmatism, and aims to translate abstract concepts from relational sociological discourse into a plain language lexicon. I will use an updated framing for C. Wright Mills “sociological imagination” as a canvas on which the patterns of ontological complexity, common within social and natural worlds, are transcribed into an easily usable script.

Author

• Margaret Walkover, University of Hawaii at Manoa