SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter last chapter: Risk Society
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Epilogue: Rethinking public engagement and collaboration
• speaking up for the facts,” as this book demonstrates, is no simple task, not even for those
invested in producing and circulating those facts to much wider audiences
• climate change requires a negotiation with ethics, morality, and meaning-making in collective and
individual terms
Public engagement and experimental futures
• Climate change poses an intellectual, scientific, and moral challenge.
• The presentation and circulation of information provide only partial answers and require a
partnership with codes for meaning, ethics, and morality in order to delineate what the stakes and
risks entail.
• Framing long-term uncertain issues in order to generate immediate action requires collaboration.
• Debate in a risk society is over how to de ne the degree, scale, and urgency of risk and, in so
doing, opens up rifts between those who produce and those who consume these definitions
• public engagement is described as the need and desire of those invested in educating, informing,
and motivating the public to act on climate change
• The term engagement implies both a desire to nd out more about an issue and an ethical
obligation to become concerned and to act
• Engagement is not only awareness, nor is it just a matter of getting the facts out.
o it is a connection most often visible in our social networks
• Engagement requires collectivity
Not just the facts
• Climate change has been filled with meaning through its interaction with belief systems,
practices, and other systems of knowledge
• Full advocacy would subordinate science to political goals, but near- advocacy follows scientific
findings into practical realms while trying to maintain the integrity of professional scientific
norms.
• Some scientists have gone so far as to get involved in policy; others have been pushed by a
confluence of factors.
• Economics is rising as a way to discuss valuation and ethical dilemmas
o Common way of risk assessment
• Sometimes the science is “black-boxed,” and in others, it is complemented by another knowledge
system.
• But science is never completely absent
• Where the science is settled, the immediacy and implications of it are not.
• Expertise in this sense is being morphed by those who are investing climate change with
particularities all the while reinforcing its universality and status as a multifaceted form of life.
Climate Change as risk and behavior
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