Dr. Gerald Taylor Aiken, Transition Initiatives to Low Carbon Futures as a Social Learning Process for Sustainability

Tuesday, May 12,
19.00-20.30
Bâtiment des Sciences, 1st floor, lecture room 3 (BS 1.03)

At the last public lecture given in the frame of the interdisciplinary course “Science & Citizens meet Challenges of Sustainability,”

Dr. Gerald Taylor Aiken will speak about, Transition Initiatives to Low Carbon Futures as a Social Learning Process for Sustainability

The Transition movement, since emerging from Totnes in 2007, have proliferated worldwide and emerged as a important grassroots community response to climate change and peak oil. Transition has also been of increasing theoretical interest, but not yet analysed as a site for social learning. Social learning processes--such as backcasting, open space techniques, preparing energy descent action plans--are integral to Transition initiatives. Because of this, the community Transition imagine acting for sustainability is not only a place-based and small-scale social arrangement of togetherness, but also a process where opening up to (environmental) others can be deliberately and purposively fostered. This is often carried out through what Transition call ‘deepening’ exercises based on, among others, the work of Johanna Macy. The chapter is empirically based on in-depth ethnographic research with three Transition groups. Understanding Transition’s community as a process transcends traditional understandings of community as place-bound and locally-rooted, it also looks to the profound implications that the more ecosophic subjectivities required for sustainability can be purposively produced. 

Gerald Taylor Aiken is a Post Doctoral Researcher in the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning at the Research Unit ‘Identités, Politiques, Sociétés, Espaces’ at the University of Luxembourg. He received his Ph.D. from Durham University in 2014 on the role of ‘community’ within grassroots environmentalism. He previously taught Geography at Leeds University and writes on the role of community in the transition to low carbon futures. He has previously published on Transition Towns amongst other community-based social movements.