Diana Stuart
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3673672 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Diana Stuart |
| PRENOMES | Diana |
| SOBRENOME | Stuart |
| ASSINATURA | STUART D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Northern Arizona University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1479-2208 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 297 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
I have no future” - the critical need to counter climate doomism
Is a New Economic System Necessary to Address Climate Change
An increasing number of leading scientists have stated that societies must transition away from a growing economic system to address climate change. Other scholars have called for general “system change” or specifically transitioning to a postcapitalist economy. Yet is a new economic system necessary to address the climate crisis? Answering this question requires examining the relevant research and empirical evidence about the relationships betwe…
Something new, something better
The climate crisis represents one of greatest threats to humankind, but also one of the greatest opportunities for positive social transformation. Given the many social ills that already degrade wellbeing, many people desire a more equitable, just, and livable world. Some people may believe because of climate change “we are doomed,” yet I argue this represents a misunderstanding of the situation. We have the means to curtail global warming and en…
Addressing the Irrational Drivers of the Climate Crisis
An increasing number of scientists have illustrated how economic growth is an underlying driver of the climate crisis. This article examines how associated levels of excess work, production, and consumption repress human flourishing and drive global warming. Drawing from the work of Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, we discuss the irrationality of a system of excess work, production, and consumption in terms of unnecessary human repression and envi…
Jon J. Berger. Solving the climate crisis
The Human Crisis Revisited
Faced with the absurdity of continued climate inaction, more people are becoming morally outraged about the projections of human suffering and loss due to global warming impacts. This article draws from the work of Albert Camus to examine human responses to absurdity through rebellion and how this can be applied to understand the notion of climate rebellion. Focusing on Camus' works The Rebel and The Plague, as well as his speech "The Human Crisi…
Revisiting Marcuse's Technological Rationality
In December 2022, a scientific breakthrough in fusion energy resulted in widespread media attention with a focus on fusion as a key strategy to mitigate climate change. In this article, we draw from Herbert Marcuse's work on technological rationality to examine fusion technology in this context. We explore if fusion is seen as a way to master nature, if it protects current power relations, and if a focus on fusion might detract attention and reso…
Articulating system change to effectively and justly address the climate crisis
Activists and world leaders increasingly call for bold climate action. Yet proposals remain far from the transformative systemic changes required. While many remain in denial that system change is necessary, others who call for system change fail to articulate what that change would entail. It is critical that the climate movement identifies and promotes specific strategies for change. Identifying synergistic proposals associated with ecosocialis…
Tensions between individual and system change in the climate movement
This article examines tensions in the climate movement between solutions that involve individual consumption and behaviour changes and those involving more transformative systemic change. Although they are demanding system change, activists in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion face accusations of hypocrisy based on their personal choices. This neoliberal appeal to hypocrisy is used to discredit, divide, and undermine the climate movemen…
Shared pretenses for collective inaction
This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) …
In search of plan(et) B
Climate Change Solutions
Climate Change Solutions represents an application of critical theory to examine proposed solutions to climate change. Drawing from Marx's negative conception of ideology, the authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction or the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. Dominant solutions to climate change that offer minor changes …
Overconsumption as Ideology
In response to climate change projections, scientists and concerned citizens are increasingly calling for changes in personal consumption. However, these calls ignore the true relationship between production and consumption and the ongoing propagation of the ideology of overconsumption. In this article, we draw from Western Marxist theorists to explain the ideology of overconsumption and its implications for addressing global climate change. Draw…
Radical Hope
How farmers “repair” the industrial agricultural system
The Degrowth Alternative
Degrowth is a planned economic contraction in wealthy countries that reduces production and consumption—and, by extension, greenhouse gas emissions and stresses on global ecosystems—to sustainable levels within ecological limits. This book explores the idea of degrowth as an economic alternative to offer a more sustainable and just future. A growing number of scientists and scholars now recognize that a system that continues to prioritize economi…
Materialized ideology and environmental problems
This article expands upon the notion of ideology as a material phenomenon, usually in the form of institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices. It draws on Herbert Marcuse and related thinkers to conceptualize technological solutions to environmental problems as materialized ideological responses to social-ecological contradictions, which, by concealing these contradictions, reproduce existing social conditions. This article outlines a method o…
Carbon Geoengineering and the Metabolic Rift
Using the concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift as a framework, this paper examines carbon geoengineering technologies as a solution to climate change and explores if it is possible to mend an ecological metabolic rift without fundamental changes in the social metabolic order. Carbon geoengineering technologies have become a key component of scenarios to limit the extent of global warming and are being discussed as a means to sequester carbon…
The climate crisis as a catalyst for emancipatory transformation
In 2018, a wave of climate change activism emerged in response to calls from scientists for urgent, unprecedented, and far-reaching changes to address the climate crisis. Three social movements, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and the Sunrise Movement, have received the most attention and continue to grow. Synthesizing and integrating Erik Olin Wright's theories of social transformation, the authors apply Wright's work to analyze these …
An accelerating treadmill and an overlooked contradiction in industrial agriculture
In this article, we explore if and why farmers are responding to the impacts of climate change with practices that increase greenhouse gas emissions. Our examination focuses on heavy rainfall events and Midwestern corn farmers' nitrogen fertilizer management. Due to climate change, the frequency and intensity of heavy rain events is increasing across the Midwest. These events increase nitrogen loss to the environment and introduces economic risks…
Reconceptualizing Climate Change Denial
Despite increasing scientific evidence supporting the need for immediate and transformative action, effective responses to address climate change remain stymied. Scholars have identified climate change denial as a factor in thwarting policy responses to climate change. We examine new forms of climate change denial that are critical to recognize as the general public and policy-makers consider actions to limit warming. Here we apply a Marxist conc…
Human-animal relations in the capitalocene
In the current era, humans have reshaped relationships with other animals in ways that have significant environmental impacts. While the populations of animals raised for human food continue to increase, populations of wild animals continue to decrease with species increasingly going extinct. These changes in human-animal relations along with their environmental and ecological impacts are unprecedented in human history. This paper examines these …
Conservation Biologists and the Representation of At-Risk Species
A political‐economic theory of relevance
Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not onl…
Farmers' Perceptions of Climate Change in Context
Sociologists commonly hypothesise that experiencing the impacts of climate change will lead actors, including farmers, to desire to address climate change. It is increasingly clear that farmers can detect the regional biophysical expressions and impacts of climate change. However, this has not led farmers to desire to take action on climate change. This begs the question: how then are farmers interpreting these experiences? We argue that politica…
Radical Hope
Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement
In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the comm…
Social conditions to better realize the environmental gains of alternative energy
Ideological obstacles to effective climate policy
In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit 'negative' theory of ideology, understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks - the 'greening' of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy,…
Scaling up to address new challenges to conservation on US farmland
Extending Social Theory to Farm Animals
We extend social theory to farm animals in an attempt to illustrate how non-human animals embedded in social systems can be examined using sociological concepts. Inspired by efforts to include the freedom to express natural behaviour in farm animal welfare standards, we applyMarx's conception of alienation to dairy cows. We first examine industrial dairy farm conditions and find that these systems result in the distortion of life and the suppress…
A political‐economic theory of relevance
Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not onl…
Reducing nitrogen fertilizer application as a climate change mitigation strategy
Diversity in agricultural technology adoption
Why Don't They Just Change? Contract Farming, Informational Influence, and Barriers to Agricultural Climate Change Mitigation
Using a mixed-methods study of contract seed-corn farmers in southwest Michigan, we examine the effect of interlocking macro and micro social forces on climate change behavior and apply the theoretical frames of treadmills of production and informational influence. We find that competitive agricultural contracts in the seed-corn industry impose significant structural barriers to adopting climate change mitigation behaviors. Seed-corn contracts co…
The illusion of control
The Political Economy of Geoengineering as Plan B
Geoengineering would mask and reproduce capital’s contradictory needs to self-expand, on the one hand, and maintain a stable climate system, on the other. The Plan B frame, which presents geoengineering as a back-up plan to address climate change in case there is a failure to sufficiently reduce emissions (Plan A), is one means to depict this condition to the public and is a product of, and appeals to, a prevalent ‘technological rationality’. Des…
Crossing the ‘great divide’ in practice
Ideological and intellectual separation between nature and society continues to limit our understanding of the world and impair our ability to address critical environmental problems. An increasing number of environmental and natural resource issues now require an integrative interdisciplinary approach. Using theoretical grounded frameworks and tools, sociologists have an important role to play in this work. This paper examines several theoretica…
Risk, anti-reflexivity, and ethical neutralization in industrial food processing
Tensions between individual and system change in the climate movement
This article examines tensions in the climate movement between solutions that involve individual consumption and behaviour changes and those involving more transformative systemic change. Although they are demanding system change, activists in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion face accusations of hypocrisy based on their personal choices. This neoliberal appeal to hypocrisy is used to discredit, divide, and undermine the climate movemen…
Producing Compliant Polluters
The majority of research to date has attributed the pollution problems associated with agriculture to the independent decisions of individual farmers; in this article, we illustrate how seed companies' subtle forms of coercion encourage farmers to become compliant polluters. We focus on corn farmers in the midwestern United States, whose management decisions have become increasingly controlled by seed companies. Beyond obvious forms of control, s…
Constrained Choice and Ethical Dilemmas in Land Management
In search of plan(et) B
Nature' is Not Guilty
Increasing incidents of widespread foodborne illness continue to highlight problems with industrialised food production. These problems emerge as a result of complicated interactions between humans and non-humans in food production networks. This article combines actor-network theory and political economy to critically examine foodborne illness, focusing on outbreaks related to industrially produced bagged salads from California. The article expl…
Get Real
This article builds on Carolan's three natures scheme, where he distinguishes between the strata of 'nature', nature and Nature, by overlaying his previous framework with further analytic distinctions. Doing this, the authors argue, adds an important layer of analytical and conceptual robustness that his earlier scheme lacks. After building on this framework, attention turns to the phenomena of climate change. A selection of agrifood studies on t…
Shared pretenses for collective inaction
This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) …
Carbon Geoengineering and the Metabolic Rift
Using the concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift as a framework, this paper examines carbon geoengineering technologies as a solution to climate change and explores if it is possible to mend an ecological metabolic rift without fundamental changes in the social metabolic order. Carbon geoengineering technologies have become a key component of scenarios to limit the extent of global warming and are being discussed as a means to sequester carbon…
How farmers “repair” the industrial agricultural system
The climate crisis as a catalyst for emancipatory transformation
In 2018, a wave of climate change activism emerged in response to calls from scientists for urgent, unprecedented, and far-reaching changes to address the climate crisis. Three social movements, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and the Sunrise Movement, have received the most attention and continue to grow. Synthesizing and integrating Erik Olin Wright's theories of social transformation, the authors apply Wright's work to analyze these …
An accelerating treadmill and an overlooked contradiction in industrial agriculture
In this article, we explore if and why farmers are responding to the impacts of climate change with practices that increase greenhouse gas emissions. Our examination focuses on heavy rainfall events and Midwestern corn farmers' nitrogen fertilizer management. Due to climate change, the frequency and intensity of heavy rain events is increasing across the Midwest. These events increase nitrogen loss to the environment and introduces economic risks…
Constrained Choice and Ethical Dilemmas in Land Management
The illusion of control
The Myth of Efficiency
Risk, anti-reflexivity, and ethical neutralization in industrial food processing
Nature' is Not Guilty
Increasing incidents of widespread foodborne illness continue to highlight problems with industrialised food production. These problems emerge as a result of complicated interactions between humans and non-humans in food production networks. This article combines actor-network theory and political economy to critically examine foodborne illness, focusing on outbreaks related to industrially produced bagged salads from California. The article expl…
Responding to Climate Change
The authors apply Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernization to examine how farmers in the United States perceive and respond to climate change. Using a case study, the authors identify diversions from Beck’s original theory and explore the importance of social constructionist and political economy perspectives. The article focuses on corn farmers in southwestern Michigan to examine climate risk recognition and reflexive responses, concentra…
Scaling up to address new challenges to conservation on US farmland
Extending Social Theory to Farm Animals
We extend social theory to farm animals in an attempt to illustrate how non-human animals embedded in social systems can be examined using sociological concepts. Inspired by efforts to include the freedom to express natural behaviour in farm animal welfare standards, we applyMarx's conception of alienation to dairy cows. We first examine industrial dairy farm conditions and find that these systems result in the distortion of life and the suppress…
Diversity in agricultural technology adoption
Evaluating the use of an environmental assurance program to address pollution from United States cropland
Reducing nitrogen fertilizer application as a climate change mitigation strategy
Industrial Animal Agribusiness and Environmental Sociological Theory
Studying the consequences of industrial animal agribusiness provides an ideal entry point for environmental sociologists to begin incorporating animals into their analyses. To explore the contributions that environmental sociology can make toward understanding the effects of industrial animal agribusiness, we (1) review selected applicable environmental sociological perspectives, and (2) examine how they have been applied and/or could be applied …
Explanations of a Changing Landscape
This paper focuses on an unprecedented bark beetle epidemic in British Columbia, Canada. The epidemic has killed vast areas of forests, with significant impacts to ecosystems and timber-dependent communities. Explanations of this outbreak continue to overlook or underemphasize important actors and relationships. This paper offers a more detailed explanation of the actors and processes involved in the outbreak and associated responses. Political e…
Agricultural Sciences and Technology
Crossing the ‘great divide’ in practice
Ideological and intellectual separation between nature and society continues to limit our understanding of the world and impair our ability to address critical environmental problems. An increasing number of environmental and natural resource issues now require an integrative interdisciplinary approach. Using theoretical grounded frameworks and tools, sociologists have an important role to play in this work. This paper examines several theoretica…
Constrained Choice and Climate Change Mitigation in US Agriculture
Get Real
This article builds on Carolan's three natures scheme, where he distinguishes between the strata of 'nature', nature and Nature, by overlaying his previous framework with further analytic distinctions. Doing this, the authors argue, adds an important layer of analytical and conceptual robustness that his earlier scheme lacks. After building on this framework, attention turns to the phenomena of climate change. A selection of agrifood studies on t…
Is seeing believing? Applying a realist framework to examine agriculture and climate change
Agricultural production contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. If the agricultural sector is to mitigate its contributions, farmers must actively adopt conservation practices. Recent studies have shown farmers’ beliefs about climate change to be influential in their support for adopting these practices. This study explores how social groups and their climate change messages interact with regional biophysical expression…
Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement
In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the comm…
Why Don't They Just Change? Contract Farming, Informational Influence, and Barriers to Agricultural Climate Change Mitigation
Using a mixed-methods study of contract seed-corn farmers in southwest Michigan, we examine the effect of interlocking macro and micro social forces on climate change behavior and apply the theoretical frames of treadmills of production and informational influence. We find that competitive agricultural contracts in the seed-corn industry impose significant structural barriers to adopting climate change mitigation behaviors. Seed-corn contracts co…
The Political Economy of Geoengineering as Plan B
Geoengineering would mask and reproduce capital’s contradictory needs to self-expand, on the one hand, and maintain a stable climate system, on the other. The Plan B frame, which presents geoengineering as a back-up plan to address climate change in case there is a failure to sufficiently reduce emissions (Plan A), is one means to depict this condition to the public and is a product of, and appeals to, a prevalent ‘technological rationality’. Des…
Nonhuman Animals as Fictitious Commodities
This article examines how nonhuman animals, along with land and labor, represent fictitious commodities as described by Karl Polanyi. Animals in agriculture are examined as an extreme example of animal commodification whose use resembles the exploitation of land and labor. Conceptual frameworks developed from Marxist theory, including the subsumption of nature, the second contradiction of capitalism, and alienation, are applied to illustrate how …
Farmer selection of sources of information for nitrogen management in the US Midwest
Social conditions to better realize the environmental gains of alternative energy
Producing Compliant Polluters
The majority of research to date has attributed the pollution problems associated with agriculture to the independent decisions of individual farmers; in this article, we illustrate how seed companies' subtle forms of coercion encourage farmers to become compliant polluters. We focus on corn farmers in the midwestern United States, whose management decisions have become increasingly controlled by seed companies. Beyond obvious forms of control, s…
Political science (36 obras) · Economics (35 obras) · Ecology (30 obras) · Sociology (27 obras) · Climate change (23 obras) · Geography (19 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Agriculture (18 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Biology (17 obras)