I recently spotted an interesting piece on the use of ‘extreme scenarios’ in climate policy research and debates. If you ignore the inflammatory click-bait title regarding “climate porn” and focus on the substance of the piece it makes some interesting observations regarding the apparent institutionalisation of particular ways of constructing scenarios that are relevant to the … [Read more…]
Well, it’s been a long time between posts. Here I’ll return to themes touched-on in the last post and a broad line of inquiry emerging from my research on prospective inquiry that seeks (in part) to explore and promote energy transitions which is also relevant to many other domains: exploring the social causes and aspects of … [Read more…]
This post and the next one will consider some of the broader learnings and thoughts that emerged from my doctoral research. This post will focus on some theoretical aspects and their possible applications and implications. One core aspect is what I term prospective knowledge practices (PKPs). In my thesis I define a PKP as: An … [Read more…]
The previous post discussed research aims. This post shifts focus to consider in a bit more detail the study that I conducted, arguments made in the thesis, and related claims. The study: I conducted a series of impact evaluations, and a related case study, which examined the “futures forums” conducted by a research group at … [Read more…]
Reading Roger Pielke Jr’s review of David Wallace-Wells’ new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future got me thinking about a process described by Pielke Jr as the transformation of “carefully caveated scenarios of the future” produced by scientific communities into “most likely futures” (or related future-oriented claims). He writes: The scientific community … [Read more…]
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) – subtitled Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts – is a social psychology book centred on self-justification and cognitive dissonance. The book also implicitly emphasises a particular philosophy of science which is linked to human psychology – it’s this aspect which got my attention. … [Read more…]
Though my doctoral research began as a fairly straightforward impact evaluation of forward-looking interventions (which I call “prospective exercises”), it evolved into a more complex piece of research and theory-building. Two of the ideas that emerged from this broader inquiry are: To understand the use and impacts of a prospective exercise (or similar future-oriented research) … [Read more…]
Over the past year I’ve sometimes been so consumed by worry and anxiety that it has been difficult to function as well as I’d like to. Some of the things that have caused me to worry have been rational concerns, broadly-speaking. For example, periods of unemployment and associated job searches can be highly stressful. At … [Read more…]
One of my intellectual side projects is to more fully develop sociological conceptions of knowledge practices. This inquiry builds on some of the analysis of prospective knowledge practices presented in my PhD thesis and will hopefully also inform other current work (e.g. work on the roles and effects of knowledge practices in transition processes). Below … [Read more…]