Description
This book is for students and researchers across the social sciences who are planning, conducting and disseminating research on sustainability-related issues. Real-world sustainability problems cross many boundaries, and this is the first book to guide students and practitioners through the practical and theoretical challenges of doing interdisciplinary research in this vital and emerging area.
Researching Sustainability contains many in-depth, 'hands on' accounts by expert contributors, providing real-life examples and lessons that can be put to use immediately. Coverage includes:
- the general challenges that sustainability presents to researchers, including frictions between sustainability and scientific tradition; complexity; research paradigms; interdisciplinarity; social-environmental interactions; and ethical concerns.
- a host of social science based research methods and approaches. Each chapter presents a different method; its challenges and suitability for different situations; an in-depth example of the method in action; insights and lessons.
- dissemination of sustainability research findings, including influencing policy, communicating with school children and working with the media.
The book concludes with a critical synthesis of issues and methods examined in the book together with a discussion of future research pathways. This book is an essential tool for students, researchers and practitioners in planning, implementing and evaluating their sustainability research.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Issues in Sustainability Research 1. Sustainability Research: An Introduction 2. Directing an Inter-Disciplinary Sustainability Research Agenda Part 2: Approaches to Sustainability Research 3. Ethnographic Practices and the Practices of Biosecurity 4. Case Study Method in Sustainability Research 5. Striving for Mutuality in Research Relationships: The Value of Participatory Action Research principles 6. 'Spaces of Sustainability': Using Mobile Methods to Investigate the Space of a Farmers' Market 7. Elite and Elite-Lite Interviewing: Managing our Industrial Legacy 8. Grounding Rapidly Emerging Disciplines: The Fairtrade Towns Movement 9. Surveying the Field: Applying the Just Sustainability Paradigm to Survey Research 10. Making Sense of Climate Change: Notes on Interpretive Policy Analysis and Discourse Analysis in Sustainability Research 1 1. Mediating Sustainability: Constructivist Approaches to Sustainability Research 12. Negotiating the Terrain: Doing Research Abroad 13. Sustainable Futures: Futures Studies and Food Supply Systems Part 3: Disseminatin Sustainability Research 14. Generalising Sustainability Research: Some Reflections from a Study of Work-Life Integration 15. Engaging with Policy Makers: Influencing Sustainability Policy through Academic Research 16. Sustaining the extra-curricular: Communicating Sustainability Research to Children 17. Engaging the Media: an Academic's Sojourn in the Newsroom. Conclusion 18. Sustainability Science: a Forward Agenda
