Constructing a story to live by: Ethics,emotions and academic practice in the context of climate change

Starting from the concept of the narrative-self, this paper explores the everyday ethics of research and academic practice as seen through the storied-experiences of two women who have chosen their careers through their desire to contribute meaningfully to the resolution of environmental issues. Selves are embedded in language, in relationships, in societies, in places and in ecologies. However, selves are also co-constructed in dialogue between teller and listener or writer and reader. In the intersubjective space opened up through dialogue lies the potential for change at both personal and societal levels. Enacting a narrative ethics of reading and writing that draws on counselling practices, this paper brings my own affective, embodied story into dialogue with the published memoir of Alison Watt. As we both struggle to find stories we can live by within the contexts of specific academic and research communities we begin to challenge the narratives and discourses that dominate our respective fields of field biology and human geography. The emotional and embodied practice of narrative ethics is offered as one possible response to the overemphasis on technical rationality within our society and its institutions. I argue that the development of practical wisdom (phronesis) is essential to addressing issues such as climate change, which are not simply technical problems but are fundamentally rooted in the human condition.     

STORYTELLING AND WICKED PROBLEMS: MYTHS OF THE ABSOLUTE AND CLIMATE CHANGE

This article examines the emphasis on facts and data in public discourse, and the belief that they provide a certainty necessary for public judgment and collective action. The heart of this belief is what I call the “myth of the Absolute,” which is the belief that by basing our judgment and actions on an Absolute we can avoid errors and mistakes. Myths of the Absolute can help us deal with wicked problems such as climate change, but they also have a downside. This article explores the experience behind these myths, to better understand how they describe and mediate our experiences of uncertainty, then relates these myths to debates about climate change. I conclude by describing how to engage these myths in a way that promotes better public discourse—and thus better public judgment and collective action—by telling these stories in such a way that we poke and prod wherever the story is not.     

Paradox explored: Climate shame,moral agency,the church,and the birds

This article explores shame and moral agency in relationship to the climate catastrophe, and the moral situation of the world's relatively high-consuming people who are implicated in greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The author complexifies that situation in the conundrums of climate colonialism, climate racism, structural sin, and the moral ambiguities they raise, including such questions as: “What are the moral demands of climate sin grounded in historically rooted economic systems that one did not create but upon which the material conditions of one's life depend? To what extent, if any, is the individual morally accountable for the social structures of which one is a part and from which one benefits?” From there, the essay moves to its central question. It is whether shame theory might help to enable moral agency for what is desperately needed now by people of climate privilege and economic privilege in the North Atlantic world—wise and courageous action to address climate change and climate injustice. The article probes shame theory for clues to what disables moral agency and what catalyzes it. The author finds in shame theory pathways for transforming shame-based moral inertia into moral agency. Those pathways suggest vital roles for the church.     

Foresight and the Seven Dimensions of Experience

How we understand and treat time says a great deal about our worldview. The major global crises we are enmeshed in are largely the result of dominant worldviews that do not correspond sufficiently with the realities of how the cosmos works. Although what humanity has learned through science has some areas of correspondence it does not have the requisite variety to correlate with the complexities unleashed in the Anthropocene. This is clear from the feedback that the world system is giving us in areas of, for example, climate change, species extinction, mental stress, and endemic violence. In this article it is proposed that the resulting deficiency of foresight occurs because our current notions of time and our resulting way of organizing and interpreting our world that follows from that seriously restricts our understanding where it is most needed. This article introduces an alternative view of time as only one of seven dimensions of our lived experience and opens more scope for practical as well as theoretical understanding.     

The Cocreation of Crazy Patchworks: Becoming Rhizomatic in Systemic Therapy

In the field of systemic therapy, there has been much discussion recently about the narrative self. This concept refers to the idea that the self is narratively constructed in and through the stories which someone tells about him/herself. The story is thereby not only viewed as a metaphor for selfhood: Selfhood is not compared to a story, it is a story. But what kind of story are we talking about here? If the self is a story, what does that story look like? These questions are explored in this article. Starting from the possibilities and limitations of traditional and postmodern visions on the self as a story, an alternative vision is illustrated. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, we not only create a useful view of the way narrative selfhood is constructed within a therapy context, but we also stimulate therapists to coconstruct—together with their clients—patchworks of self‐stories. By using story fragments of our own practice, we illustrate the rhizomatic thinking and its possibilities in therapy.     

Feeling at home in contemporary Japan: Space,atmosphere and intimacy

Based on a long-term ethnography inside thirty urban dwellings, this article aims to explore what it means to feel ‘at home’ in contemporary Japan. Ample attention has been paid to the staging of atmospheres in public spaces, but qualitative studies about domestic atmospheres are scarce and the emphasis tends to be on ‘front-stage’ concerns such as hospitality, status, and normativity. By contrast, by focussing on ‘back-stage’ activities such as sleeping, eating, and bathing, this article will show how these bodily practices may generate, assisted by various domestic technologies, an all-encompassing heat that encourages intimate sociality without infringing on individual needs for autonomy and detachment from social demands. More generally, the article argues that by exploring the complex entanglements of ideal and actual atmospheres we might gain a more comprehensive understanding of this expansive, spatial phenomenon and its relationship with intimacy within different cultural contexts.     

Looking Through Ulanowicz’s “Third Window”

After a ??very personal?? introduction, and a reference to how accurate indeed is the use of the ??new window?? metaphor by Ulanowicz and about what ??can be seen through it??, the article dwells into the evolution of our understanding about the most general sources??material and/or non-material??of change and transformation; in order to examine further the item about the ways through which ??information?? can be a source of change and transformation also in pre-biotic processes, where commonly it is not taken into account. Thus, the article argues the convergence between Ulanowicz??s and the Author??s treatments of??non only biotic??networks of configuration of processes (a central theme in Ulanowicz??s book). Finally, the article pays attention to how Ulanowicz??s vision through his ??new Third Window??, can indeed help us transcend the non desirable division of contemporary culture into two isolated compartments (science and technology versus the humanities and ethics), which has contributed not only to the globalization of communications, transactions, knowledge and so on, but also to the globalization of multiple crisis of different sort that need to be solved if we want ??a better world to be possible??.     

RE‐ENVISIONING HOPE: ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE,LEARNED IGNORANCE,AND RELIGIOUS NATURALISM

In this essay, I introduce religious naturalism as one contemporary religious response to anthropogenic climate change; in so doing, I offer a concept of hope associated with the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing ourselves in the usual manner. Reframing humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature, religious naturalism encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more‐than‐human worlds that constitute our existence. Hope in this context is anticipating what possibilities may occur when human organisms enact our evolutionary capacities as relational organisms who can love, engaging in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, values, and relationships that promote the betterment of myriad nature.     

What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model (1) explains how individual action contributes to structural change, (2) justifies demands for action from each particular agent, (3) specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, (4) moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and (5) provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice.     

Bridging the HIV Divide: Stigma,Stories and Serodiscordant Sexuality in the Biomedical Age

At a time when advances in biomedicine have rendered people with HIV non-infectious under certain conditions, much public discourse on HIV remains stuck in a paradigm of ‘risk’, which does little to lessen the divide between people with and without HIV in society or challenge the way intimate relationships across this divide are typically stigmatised as undesirable and problematic. We rarely hear the stories of couples who live with mixed HIV statuses and how they themselves perceive and manage their so called ‘serodiscordance’. In this article, we examine such stories by mixed-status couples in Australia. In stark contrast to the dominant discourse, these couples invoked narratives of love, the everyday unimportance and manageability of HIV, and recent developments in HIV medicine, thereby challenging the way serodiscordant sexuality has been cast in public health research. Drawing on Ken Plummer’s work on hidden sexual stories, we consider not only the content of their stories, but the broader significance of stories to the world in which they are enacted, of storytelling as a rally for social and political recognition and legitimacy. Reflecting on our own role in the co-production of research stories, we argue that by moving marginalised sexual stories out of silence, stigmatised communities and researchers can conjointly and incrementally shape a new public discourse and new forms of ‘intimate citizenship’.     

When “Living Stories” Encounter the Living Word

This article focuses on biblical forms (psalms, proverbs, and parables) and story genres (inspirational, paradoxical, and miraculous) that inform the pastoral counseling process in ways that make the stories of our lives become more vivid. It does so primarily by examining Donald Capps’ contributions in Living Stories and Biblical Approaches to Pastoral Counseling by studying the living stories in juxtaposition to the biblical forms.     

A Contextual Approach to Political Theory

This article explores the advantages of using a range of actual cases in doing political theory. This sort of approach clarifies what is at stake in alternative theoretical formulations, draws attention to the wisdom that may be embedded in existing practices, and encourages theorists to confront challenges they might otherwise overlook and to think through the implications of their accounts more fully.     

Individual Responsibility for Climate Change

As we become more aware of the potential causes and consequences of climate change we are left wondering: who is responsible? Climate change has the potential to harm large portions of the global population and, arguably, is already doing so. Further, climate change is argued to be human‐caused. If this is true, then it seems to be the case that we can analyze climate change in terms of responsibility. I argue that we can approach environmental harms, such as climate change, through a theory of collective responsibility. I propose an account of reductive collective responsibility that can apply to the unstructured collective causing climate change and determine what we are each individually morally responsible for. To avoid the critiques of reductive collective responsibility for large unstructured harms, I propose we separate the determination of membership and eligibility for responsibility from the attribution of responsibility. Through this method, I can speak to the individual responsibility of each member who contributes to climate change without holding them responsible for that which is outside their control.     

The Cards that are Dealt You

Various philosophers have argued that in order to be morally responsible, we need to be the "ultimate sources' of our choices and behavior. Although there are different versions of this sort of argument, I identify a "picture' that lies behind them, and I contend that this picture is misleading. Joel Feinberg helpfully suggested that we scale down what might initially be thought to be legitimate demands on "self-creation,' rather than jettison the idea that we are truly and robustly responsible. I follow Feinberg in rejecting various "inflated' demands on "origination,' "initiation,' or ultimate sourcehood.     

Spinoza and the Feeling of Freedom

We seem to have a direct experience of our freedom when we act. Many philosophers take this feeling of freedom as evidence that we possess libertarian free will. Spinoza denies that we have free will of any sort, although he admits that we nonetheless feel free. Commentators often attribute to him what I call the ‘Negative Account’ of the feeling: it results from the fact that we are conscious of our actions but ignorant of their causes. I argue that the Negative Account is flawed. The feeling of freedom also depends on a vacillation of the mind. When the mind forms too many incompatible associations, it vacillates between them. When we act, the mind vacillates back and forth between the kinds of actions that we associate with our present mental state. We then mistake this subjective vacillation for an objective feature of ourselves—namely, the power to do otherwise.     

Imagination,Pop Culture and Ministry with Youth and Young Adults1

Abstract : In this article I raise the question of whether and how Christians can become captive to a kind of constricted imagination, and how this does not serve the church well in its work with youth and young adults. I draw on examples from pop music (Kanye West, U2) to portray the theological logic of ‘check‐list Christianity.’ As an alternative, I follow C. S. Lewis in reorienting the perspective from deciding if some cultural object (song, movie, TV show) is good or bad, to asking what sort of people we become by attending to this or that cultural object; specifically, does it enlarge our being‐before‐God or not? This requires that we also view pop culture as the domain of God's work in Christ, and that we confess that God is already working reconciliation in the midst of the world.     

Terminator or Super Mario: Human/Computer Hybrids, Actual and Virtual

Abstract: Is a human/computer hybrid feasible: If so, in what ways would such hybridization affect our concept of what it means to be human? There are two forms of such hybridization, the actual and the virtual. Actual hybridization involves the implantation of mechanical devices in the human body. In actual hybridization the computer comes to us and to our body to enhance our functioning in our world. In virtual hybridization we go to the computer, projecting our minds into the world of cyberspace and being formed there. Perhaps the most common form of virtual hybridization is the immersion our children experience in the world of video games. Both forms of hybridization encourage us to think of ourselves only in terms of function, just when most of our theologians find that humans reflect the image of God through our relationships. This emphasis on function best serves the military, but leaves us in the theological community with a dissatisfying concept of what it means to be human.     

Affective judgments,common sense,and Zajonc's thesis of independence

Zajonc (1980) argued that, contrary to what is commonly believed, an affective judgment about a stimulus may be independent of the cognitive processes through which we know what that stimulus is. The evidence Zajonc offered (the exposure effect in the absence of recognition) does not entail this claim. An example of the sort of experiment that could do so is offered. When carried out, however, this study indicated the opposite: An affective judgment about a stimulus depended on how it was cognitively interpreted. We argue that what is commonly believed in this area is presumptively correct: Affective judgments about a stimulus depend on whatever information is possessed about that stimulus.     

Settler Colonialism,Decolonization, and Climate Change

The article proposes that climate change makes enduring colonial injustices and structures visible. It focuses on the imposition and dominance of colonial concepts of land and self-determination on Indigenous peoples in settler states. It argues that if the dominance of these colonial frameworks remains unaddressed, the progressing climate change will worsen other colonial injustices, too. Specifically, Indigenous self-determination capabilities will be increasingly undermined, and Indigenous peoples will experience the loss of what they understand as relevant land from within their own ontologies of land. The article holds that even if settler states strive to repair colonial injustices, these efforts will be unsuccessful if climate change occurs and decolonization is pursued within the framework of a settler colonial ontology of land. Therefore, the article suggests, decolonization of the ontologies of land and concepts of self-determination is a precondition for a just response to climate change.     

“I Stand in the Middle of the Ocean”

The challenge of climate change for the South Pacific Island of Kiribati demands a 21st‐century missional vision to help respond effectively to the hopes and fears of islanders. This article employs a “coconut theology” embedded within an Indigenous knowledge thought‐system and the daily cultural experiences of the Kiribati people. Using coconut theology as a qualitative method, this study views climate songs as a source of primary data. The songs are collected and analyzed through a thematic approach. The findings demonstrate that songs play a critical role in the Kiribati people’s culture, keeping their voice alive and helping them make sense of their experiences of climate change. Based on the findings, the article argues that climate change songs embody critical theologies that could help the church embrace Indigenous imagination in its search for contextual relevance and effective response to climate change.