From Incremental Change to Radical Disjuncture: Rethinking Everyday Household Sustainability Practices as Survival Skills

Chris Gibson, Lesley Head and Chantel Carr

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2015, vol. 105, issue 2, 416-424

Abstract: Households within affluent countries are increasingly prominent in climate change adaptation research; meanwhile, social and cultural research has sought to render more complex the dynamics of domesticity and home spaces. Both bodies of work are nevertheless framed within a view of the future that is recognizable from the present, a future reached via socioecological change that is gradual rather than transformative or catastrophic. In this article, we acknowledge the agency of extreme biophysical forces and ask what everyday household life might be like in an unstable future significantly different from the present. We revisit our own longitudinal empirical research examining household sustainability and reinterpret key results in a more volatile frame influenced by political ecological work on disasters. We seek to move beyond incremental to transformative conceptions of change and invert vulnerability as capacity. Vulnerability and capacity are contingent temporally and spatially and experienced intersubjectively. The resources for survival are ultimately social and therefore compel closer scrutiny of, among other things, household life.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00045608.2014.973008 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:105:y:2015:i:2:p:416-424

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.973008

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().