Kritiska gemenskaper: att skriva feministisk och postkolonial vetenskap

Antologin Kritiska gemenskaper är en vänbok till professor Diana Mulinari vid Lunds universitet. Medverkande i antologin är: Malinda Andersson, Signe Arnfred, Anna Bredström, Cynthia Cockburn, Paulina de los Reyes, Maud Eduards, Suvi Keskinen, Wuokko Knocke, Gail Lewis, Mia Liinason, Carina Listerborn, Åsa Lundqvist, Catrin Lundström, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Irene Molina, Anders Neergaard, Tiina Rosenberg, Maja Sager, Kerstin Sandell, Ulrika Schmauch, Rebecca Selberg, Aina Tollefsen,Chia-Ling Yang, Alexandra Ålun

Trade union perceptions of the labour - nature relationship

This paper is based on research with environmentally engaged trade unionists in India. It follows their trajectories into the trade union and explores their environmental engagements. A short presentation of the history of Indian trade unionism, aims to understand its ‘multi-unionism’. Analysing three exemplary life-histories of unionists, their motivations to engage in unions and their relationships to workers and to poor people, three models of perceiving the labour-nature relationship are offered: the container model, nature as a mediator of survival, and the nature-labour alliance. I show that the way in which unionists perceive the labour-nature relationship is shaped by their practices and influences their environmental policies. Furthermore, trade unions who seek alliances with other social movements on equal terms, develop a more comprehensive perception of the labour-nature relationship and thereby the development of more wide-ranging environmental policies. I conclude suggesting that the conditions enabling a more comprehensive perception of the labour-nature relationship could become possible if workers along the value chain could collaborate to learn from each other about their working conditions and the natures they transform

Border Crossing and the Logics of Space : A Case Study in Pro-Environmental Practices

We investigate whether and how workers in a transnational oil corporation carry practices, meanings, and identities between the places of work and home, focusing on environmental and health and safety practices, in order to understand the larger question, how can environmentally relevant practices be generalized in society at large? Our theoretical starting point is that societal institutions function according to different logics (Thornton et al., 2012) and the borders (Clark, 2000) between these institutions create affordances and constraints on the transfer of practices between these places. By connecting their theoretical ideas, we suggest that these provide an alternative critique and explanatory account of the transfer of environmental practices between home and work than a “spillover” approach. We employ life history interviews to explore the development and complexity of the causes, justifications, and legitimations of people’s actions, social relationships, and the structural constraints which govern relationships between these spaces. While Clark’s concepts of permeable, strong, or blended borders are useful heuristic tools, people may simultaneously strengthen, transgress, or blend the borders between work and home in terms of practices, meanings, identities, or institutional logics. Individuals have to be understood as creators of the border crossing process, which is why their life histories and the ways in which their identities and their attachments to places (i.e., institutions) are shaped by the logics of these places are important. For environmental practices to travel from work to home, they need to become embedded in a company culture that allows their integration into workers’ identities