Sustainability Science and Expertise: Sociological Perspectives

University of Gothenburg, Sweden

General Description

This elective is also an optional course within the 2-year Master’s Programme in Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. The language of tuition is English. Course lectures and seminars are held mainly during the month of February. ESST students will be allocated a local supervisor upon arrival in Gothenburg. While working on their theses, ESST students are welcome to attend the monthly STS seminars held jointly by the University of Gothenburg and neighbouring Chalmers University of Technology. There is also a monthly STS ‘fika’ and an STS work-in-progress seminar to participate in at the Department of Sociology & Work Science if desired. The STS Research Group will be able to host a maximum of 2 ESST students every spring.

How can the social sciences contribute to sustainability transitions research? How do the challenges of ecological crisis call for new patterns of science and society relations, including the creation of new forms of social science expertise? This course asks how research within STS and environmental sociology can contribute to the struggles for a ‘just’ transition.

The course begins by interrogating different visions of a more publicly engaged and accountable social science responding to the grand challenges of achieving a just and fair transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. These visions, portraying social scientists as engaged and committed experts, are discussed as moving beyond the traditional ‘linear model of expertise’ where science is tasked with ‘speaking truth to power’. In contrast to this model, expertise is portrayed as a distributed and relational phenomenon cultivated within social and material networks stretching across the worlds of science and politics.

This opens for discussion of the many and varied interactions between politics and expertise shaping environmental policy and practice today. Attention will be paid, for example, to new forms of citizen and community research where academics partner with activists to get ‘undone science’ carried out, further evidencing environmental risk and harm. In addition, the importance of expert activism and advocacy will be highlighted for bounding science and politics in the transdisciplinary fields of sustainability transitions research. Different combinations of expertise and activism will be related to the varying conceptions of justice shaping climate, energy and environmental transitions research, which have created the challenge of coordinating and unifying the struggles for a ‘just transition’.