Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: Uncategorized

  • Daniel Bell and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

    Capitalism is often understood as an economic system based on markets, private property, competition, productivity, and growth. However, for the sociologist Daniel Bell, capitalism was not only an economic structure. It was also a cultural system, and this cultural dimension created one of its deepest contradictions. In his influential book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,…

  • Interdisciplinary Reflections from Katowice

    Last week I was in Katowice for a meeting of the Horizon-funded ISABEL Horizon project, where we explored the impacts of the green transition on job destruction and job creation, especially in regions historically shaped by coal industries. What struck me most was the diversity of the consortium. It brings together people from fields such…

  • The Mushroom at the en of the world

    This book tells of travels with mushrooms in order to explore indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity: life without the promise of stability. I once read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thousands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms. These are not the mushrooms Anna…

  • Fieldwork in a village in Central Nepal

    I was watching this video as part of a seminar on ethnography at the Comillas Institute at Columbia University, and while taking notes I began to organize its insights around what can be understood as the different stages of fieldwork. What follows is not a rigid model, but a way of presenting the process more…

  • Understanding Public Perceptions of a New Pit Lake in As Pontes, Spain

    The introduction of coal mining in the 1940’s transformed the landscape and economy of As Pontes, Spain. Industrialisation created successive waves of economic and population booms, but when the mining slowed in the 1990s, the region experienced economic depression. Real and perceived social divisions and environmental abuses on the part of the mining company remained…

  • Landscape value

    Landscape value corresponds to an attachment or emotional bond that people develop with places. There are strong cultural ties to landscapes and feelings for the visual beauty of mountains, lakes, coasts, forests, etc., which are a common bond among people or social groups of a given region. Arguments related to landscape values are commonly heard…

  • ‘Swarm Electrification’ in Bangladesh Lets Neighbours Swap Solar Electricity

    For decades, families had little choice but to use kerosene. Now they’re swapping solar electricity. Original source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg7kpa/mesolshare-rural-bangladesh-swarm-electrification-off-the-grid Ten households in Shakimali Matborkandi, a village in the Shariatpur district of Bangladesh, have seen a dramatic change over the past year in the way they light their homes and charge their mobile phones. For decades, these…

  • Sociology of “wasted” places

    Most abandoned buildings, plants and areas appeared in the Soviet Russia (’70-’80) because they belonged to the “state” (meaning nobody) and afterwards (’90) as a result of the economic crisis. But each place has its own story (in which I, to be honest, do not have much interest). I think we are all not indifferent…

  • why​ is writing a literature review such hard work? part two

    via why​ is writing a literature review such hard work? part two

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