Bringing hope to crisis: critical thinking, ethical action and social change

This paper departs from this point to consider whether and how crisis thinking contributes to practices of affirmative critique and transformative social action in late-capitalist societies. I argue that different deployments of crisis thinking have different ‘affect-effects’ and consequences for ethical and political practice. Some work to mobilize political action through articulating a politics of fear, assuming that people take most responsibility for the future when they fear the alternatives. Other forms of crisis thinking work to heighten critical awareness by disrupting existential certainty, asserting an ‘ethics of ambiguity’ which assumes that the continuous production of uncertain futures is a fundamental part of the human condition (de Beauvoir, 2000). In this paper, I hope to illustrate that the first deployment of crisis thinking can easily justify the closing down of political debate, discouraging radical experimentation and critique for the sake of resolving problems in a timely and decisive way. The second approach to crisis thinking, on the other hand, has greater potential to enable intellectual and political alterity in everyday life—but one that poses considerable challenges for our understandings of and responses to climate change...

How does knowledge relate to political action?

In this paper we investigate the relation between knowledge and political action, focusing on knowledge claims stemming from science that at the same time have relevance in a policy context. In so doing, we will revisit some well-known and some lesser known approaches, such as C.P. Snow's thesis of the two cultures and Mannheim's conceptualization of theory and practice. We arrive at a distinction between knowledge for practice and practical knowledge, which we briefly apply to the case of climate change science and policy. We state as our thesis that policy is ever more reliant on knowledge, but science can deliver ever less certainty. Political decisions and programs have to recognize this fact, either implicitly or explicitly. This creates a paradox that is normally resolved through the political decision and not the dissemination of "truth" in the sense of uncontested knowledge. We use the case of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as an example. © 2012 Copyright ICCR Foundation.