Why is everyone talking about climate change … again?

In this short article, I reflect on the last 50 years of environmental mobilisations in Europe and ask why democracy is important for contemporary climate action. Although the current wave of climate protests seems to share many characteristics with its 1970s predecessors, there is also a sense that contemporary movements and campaigns present a new quality in the long history of combating global warming. Are there any lessons that can be drawn from the history of environmentalism that can help us understand the current condition of climate action? I hope that by putting the environmental movement in a historical perspective, we can gain an insight into the factors that play a decisive role in effecting socio-ecological change

No Stable Ground: Real Democracy in the Occupy Movement

This thesis documents and analyses various aspects of the Occupy movement in Dublin and Cork in Ireland as well as the San Francisco Bay Area (Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley) in the United States. The core focus of this investigation is Occupy’s direct democratic processes and dynamics both as a way of making decisions as well as organising collectively. I draw on militant ethnographic, movement-relevant and participatory action research as well as on the theoretical concepts of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan in order to develop an embedded and nuanced, contemporary understanding of the nature of political engagement and direct democracy in the Occupy movement and beyond. The research shows what direct democracy actually looks like. If I were to point to one thing that the Occupy movement taught its participants, it would be that direct democracy, as practised by real people in real situations, is not always this ideal of a non-alienating, self-transparent way of making collective decisions and engaging in actions. This research highlights the realities of the movement situation where the participants had to negotiate uncertainty with their responsibility and commitment to Occupy and the issues that it raised. The analysis also brings out the complexity of Occupy’s temporalities of living “real democracy” that does not simply mean “substantive” as opposed to the “void” liberal representational form of democracy. In my usage, real democracy signifies the lived experience of people's political engagement that is radical yet riddled with inconsistencies and uncertainties. The analysis outlines also the framework of “real politics” – a politics that accepts the constitutive lack of the political sphere, the contradictory demands at the basis of democracy, the irreducibility of social antagonisms and alterity. In this thesis, I am interested in giving an account of and analysing the subjective realities of Occupy participants' political engagement with change. I also claim that this engagement represents an innovative approach to democracy which may constitute an alternative to the current liberal representative politics of the Western world. This thesis hopes to feed back in to movements an understanding of social action as inescapably complex and often contradictory in nature, which is positive since it affirms movements’ radical agency (movements do not unfold in an automatic or a structurally determined way but make active interventions into their situations)

Fracking Lancashire: The planning process, social harm and collective trauma

To date there have been very few studies that have sought to investigate the crimes, harms and human rights violations associated with the process of ‘extreme energy’, whereby energy extraction methods grow more ‘unconventional’ and intense over time as easier to extract resources are depleted. The fields of rural sociology and political science have produced important perception studies but few social impact studies. The field of ‘green criminology’, while well suited to examining the impacts of extreme energy given its focus on social and environmental ‘harms’, has produced just one citizen ‘complaint’ study to date. It is vital that more social and environmental impact studies become part of the local, national and international public policy debate. To this end, in the following paper we seek to move beyond perception studies to highlight the harms that can occur at the planning and approval stage. Indeed, while the UK is yet to see unconventional gas and oil extraction reach the production stage, as this article shows, local communities can suffer significant harms even at the exploration stage when national governments with neoliberal economic agendas are set on developing unconventional resources in the face of considerable opposition and a wealth of evidence of environmental and social harms. This paper takes a broad interdisciplinary approach, inspired by green criminological insights, that shows how a form of ‘collective trauma’ has been experienced at the exploration stage by communities in the North of England.publishedVersio

Futures of Fracking and the Everyday: Hydrocarbon Infrastructures, Unruly Materialities and Conspiracies

Drawing on ethnographic research in two locations facing the prospect of shale gas exploration in Poland and the UK, I analyse how the future can be simultaneously predetermined and undetermined. Local actors handle this complex experience by relating to fracking infrastructures, fixing the materialities of shale gas as well as cultivating an air of conspiracy around the intricacies of gas developments. I focus on the everyday to broaden the scope of recent scholarly writing on resource indeterminacy that explores how corporate strategies create the futures of resource extraction. The contradictory temporalities that these strategies generate have to be reconciled at the sites of extraction. I call for opening our theorisations up to how resource indeterminacy and assertions of predetermined futures are mediated in the everyday contexts of noncorporate actors. By considering these daily forms of engagement with resource exploration, we gain a more realistic perspective on the potentialities of extraction

Watching fracking: Public engagement in postindustrial Britain

The UK government's efforts to facilitate shale gas exploration have been matched by a surge of public opposition. The latter has manifested in a broad spectrum of activities in which local communities have “watched fracking”—meaning they have observed, protested, and filmed outside the drilling site, often taking note of when the pumps start and stop. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northwest England, I analyze residents’ various “watching” activities as one dynamic through which they sought to mediate situated modes of sociopolitical erasure. Watching fracking was a form of directly participating in public matters, compensating the watchers for the state's perceived failures and those of corporate models of community engagement. It also helped members of the anti-fracking community distance themselves from the state and their own feelings of alienation. By thus highlighting how disappointment with state formations interacts with an activist subjectivity, anthropologists can deepen our understanding of the changing relationship between state and society

Shale Gas Development and Community Distress: Evidence from England

This research examines psychosocial stress associated with shale gas development through the narratives of residents and the Revised Impact of Event Scale (IES-R). We carried out our research in three of England’s communities impacted by shale gas development. To gather data, we conducted qualitative interviews and engaged in participant observation in all three communities and conducted a quantitative survey of residents. From our qualitative interviews it was apparent that the residents we spoke with experienced significant levels of stress associated with shale gas development in each community. Importantly, residents reported that stress was not only a reaction to development, but a consequence of interacting with industry and decision makers. Our quantitative findings suggest that a significant portion of residents 14.1 living near the shale gas sites reported high levels of stress (i.e., scoring 24 or more points) even while the mean IES-R score of residents living around the site is relatively low (i.e., 9.6; 95 CI 7.5–11.7). We conclude that the experiences, of the three English communities, reported in the qualitative interviews and quantitative survey are consistent with the reports of stress in the United States for those residents who live in shale gas communities. We therefore suggest that psychosocial stress is an important negative externality, which needs to be taken seriously by local planning officers and local planning committees when considering exploration and development permits for shale gas

How can we research social movements? An introduction

This introductory chapter is written for beginning researchers, whether in movements or universities, for people from non-traditional academic backgrounds and non-native English speakers. We share some of our own complicated and messy routes to movement research. We also explain why researching social movements matters, and how it can genuinely help movements. This is the first methods handbook for movement researchers that takes a genuinely global perspective, rather than focussing on researchers and movements in the global North. Understanding movements means not being restricted to knowing about one movement or one academic discipline. The chapter introduces the book’s themes - the methodologies and politics of knowledge of movement research; different methods of data collection/analysis; and the uses of research for movements - followed by a chapter-by-chapter overview, highlighting the specific movements studied. The chapter concludes with reflections on the future of social movements research and a call for solidarity

Mistrust and earthquakes: why Lancashire communities are so shaken by fracking tremors

After a month of tranquillity, fracking has resumed at the Preston New Road site near Blackpool triggering the biggest tremor to date. There have been 12 tremors over a four-day period, including the biggest so far – the 1.5 magnitude quake. In total, 36 earthquakes were recorded in the area between the middle of October and early November. Most of these are too weak to be felt at the surface, but can be measured using seismometers. These are instruments that measure ground motions, caused by such events as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, among other factors. Local residents are concerned the earthquakes may cause cracks in the fracking well’s casing, which could potentially lead to contamination issues. Some scientists claim the impact of these seismic events at surface is equivalent to dropping a melon onto the floor. But government officials and those in the fracking industry have dismissed the tremors – suggesting they are inconsequential. As a social scientist living in Lancashire, I have been researching the social impacts of shale gas developments since 2015. From what I have seen, there is much more to the tremors than just ground movements. The impact of the quakes that occurred far below ground reverberated strongly throughout the community living on the surface. To understand why this is the case it is important to understand local people’s experiences of shale gas exploration in the UK

No Stable Ground: Real Democracy in the Occupy Movement

This thesis documents and analyses various aspects of the Occupy movement in Dublin and Cork in Ireland as well as the San Francisco Bay Area (Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley) in the United States. The core focus of this investigation is Occupy’s direct democratic processes and dynamics both as a way of making decisions as well as organising collectively. I draw on militant ethnographic, movement-relevant and participatory action research as well as on the theoretical concepts of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan in order to develop an embedded and nuanced, contemporary understanding of the nature of political engagement and direct democracy in the Occupy movement and beyond. The research shows what direct democracy actually looks like. If I were to point to one thing that the Occupy movement taught its participants, it would be that direct democracy, as practised by real people in real situations, is not always this ideal of a non-alienating, self-transparent way of making collective decisions and engaging in actions. This research highlights the realities of the movement situation where the participants had to negotiate uncertainty with their responsibility and commitment to Occupy and the issues that it raised. The analysis also brings out the complexity of Occupy’s temporalities of living “real democracy” that does not simply mean “substantive” as opposed to the “void” liberal representational form of democracy. In my usage, real democracy signifies the lived experience of people\u27s political engagement that is radical yet riddled with inconsistencies and uncertainties. The analysis outlines also the framework of “real politics” – a politics that accepts the constitutive lack of the political sphere, the contradictory demands at the basis of democracy, the irreducibility of social antagonisms and alterity. In this thesis, I am interested in giving an account of and analysing the subjective realities of Occupy participants\u27 political engagement with change. I also claim that this engagement represents an innovative approach to democracy which may constitute an alternative to the current liberal representative politics of the Western world. This thesis hopes to feed back in to movements an understanding of social action as inescapably complex and often contradictory in nature, which is positive since it affirms movements’ radical agency (movements do not unfold in an automatic or a structurally determined way but make active interventions into their situations)

A social take on unconventional resources: Materiality, alienation and the making of shale gas in Poland and the United Kingdom

Unlike conventional resources, unconventional gas (such as shale gas) is trapped in low permeability rock, from which it does not flow naturally. Hence, its extraction is costly and requires sophisticated technologies. Building on my ethnographic work in north-west England and south-east Poland, I explore people’s engagements with shale gas materialities to show how the category of an ‘unconventional resource’ – framed by geological and engineering sciences – has more than merely technological implications. Instead, shale gas produces new sociotechnical relations by trying to remove itself from social entanglements. These attempts fail to contain the unruly forces of the subsurface and local impacts, bringing the alienating dynamics of resource-making into sharp relief. The irregularities of materials and infrastructural limits, integral to the socially dis-embedded ‘unconventionality’ of the developments, inadvertently turn shale gas projects into a site of the political