Why we need social science
In: ftapo, 2011
academicJournal
Zugriff:
The social sciences produce a kind of knowledge that has become vital, writes Raewyn Connell in this edited extract from her new book, Confronting Equality. • LATE IN 2009, the United Nations convened a great meeting in Copenhagen on an issue being defined as the greatest challenge of our time. Specialists in climate science had warned for years about the growing turbulence and risk resulting from human activities that change and especially heat the atmosphere. After two weeks of bitter wrangling, the governments of the world went home, having agreed on almost nothing. Developing countries, led by China, refused more extra restrictions on their high-pollution drive for economic growth; rich countries, led by the United States, refused the demand to wind down their high-consumption way of life. In mid 2010, the British-based transnational oil corporation BP had a nasty accident at an underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting from the urgent search for more fossil fuel as the time of ‘peak oil’ approaches. A media blitz followed the threat of pollution to the southern coast of the United States. A few media stories – only a few – drew a parallel with the catastrophe that had already surrounded oil spills on another continent. The Niger River delta has been the scene of epic corruption, social dislocation, civil war and devastating pollution since the oil companies arrived in the 1950s. These traumatic events are not bad luck and not failures of personal leadership. They are consequences of the way our institutions and structures work: decisions in the hands of small elites, global struggle for profits and power, massive inequalities of resources, and the triumph of short-term calculation. We do not have a global environment problem, really. We have a global social problem. Ecological crisis and injustice can only be solved by social action and institutional change. The spread of HIV/AIDS, to take another critical issue, is not just a medical problem. From the early years of the epidemic it was clear that .
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Why we need social science
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Connell, Raewyn |
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Zeitschrift: | ftapo, 2011 |
Veröffentlichung: | Policy Online, 2011 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
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