Dustin Mulvaney

The creation of an integrated sustainability curriculum and student praxis projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to share the content and early results from an interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum that integrates theory and practice (praxis). The curriculum links new topical courses concerning renewable energy, food, water, engineering and social change with specialized labs that enhance technological and social‐institutional sustainability literacy and build team‐based project collaboration skills.Design/methodology/approach – In responses to dynamic interest emerging from university students and society, scholars from Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sociology, Education and Politics Departments united to create this curriculum. New courses and labs were designed and pre‐existing courses were “radically retrofitted” and more tightly integrated through co‐instruction and content. The co‐authors discuss the background and collaborative processes that led to the emergence of this curriculum and describe the pedagogy and results associated with the student projects.Find...

Opening the Black Box of Solar Energy Technologies: Exploring Tensions Between Innovation and Environmental Justice

The past decade has seen a renewed focus on innovations in solar energy research, development, and deployment. Solar energy offers the promise of transitioning away from carboniferous stocks of energy toward renewable energy resources. Publics around the world are increasingly demanding that governments— particularly across Europe, North America, and Asia—make substantial investments in solar energy technologies, which broadly signify energy independence, green jobs, and a renewable energy economy (Hess, 2012). Governments see it as a geopolitical imperative. In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama reminded the public of a crossroads in the clean technology race—our generation’s Sputnik moment. What does the rise of solar energy portend for environmental justice (EJ), the principle that no people or community should be unequally exposed to environmental or public health harms? Will some community, class, race, or geographical location disproportionately bear the burden of solar energy innovations? Several recent innovations in the solar energy space across areas ranging from materials science and contract manufacturing to clean technology and public lands policy Science as Culture, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 2, 230–237, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786995

Energy and Global Production Networks

Global production networks (GPNs) refer to activities and organizational structures that transform labor, nature, and capital across disparate geographies into commodities and services. The framework is often used to understand economic development and the socio-ecological transformation of natural resources. This chapter describes elemental concepts utilized in the GPN literature such as those used in global commodity chain, global value chain, and supply chain research. It also details the goals, objectives, and debates within the literature. Three case studies related to energy and global production systems—solar photovoltaics, shale gas, and salmon aquaculture—are detailed illustrating what can be learned from the approach.

Lifeblood: oil, freedom, and the forces of capital

perhaps relates heritage matters outside themselves, as it were. As a resume of social and cultural geography’s recent conceptual thrusts it works well, and usefully demonstrates how the conceptual paths can be articulated in concrete terms. That starts with individuals’ lives and feeling(s) and works to reveal a kind of vernacular heritage no less important than that of the grand narratives, heritage very much self-constructed, and emergent across plural sites and space–times of practice, performativity and reflection (Crouch, 2010): heritage’s emergence in the lived commingling of ‘here’, there; doings and memory. In this, the book takes us up to a point. The cases it discusses are lightly handled and could go much further, given the ground of conceptual advance that embeds the text. Alas as too often across many publishers, its monochrome illustrations are disappointingly blurry and faint grey, now a near-habitual problem that makes us wonder their purpose. What must be the apogee of this text for me is its handling of recent work on emotion and affect: the often-ignored complexity of feeling, subjectivity, space, self and others positioned in unravelling heritage and Heritage. This book widely examines heritage in relation to us as human beings, in our experience; it acknowledges the experience in its atmospheres, and criss-crosses these with particular identified ‘heritage’. Kathleen Stewart never gets lost in the syntax of theory, and in a fleshly way in their writing, Waterton and Watson draw upon her ordinary affects and enlighten heritage through density and texture, moving through our bodies, dreams, dramas, in a full range of worlding. The semiotics of heritage, or I suppose of anything, turns out similarly to be fluid, contingent, flexible, open, lived, real. This book is a welcome contribution to talking through how that all works.