Sustainability, interdisciplinarity and transformative change: a critical realist response to the crisis system

Sustainability, Interdisciplinarity and Transformative Change: A Critical Realist Response to the Crisis System. This was the main theme addressed at the 21st Annual Conference for International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) in Lillehammer, Norway, the last week of August 2018. The conference attracted about 70 quality keynote speakers, paper presenters and panel participants. In addition, more than 40 participants attended the two-day pre-conference session, which was combined with a Ph.D. course. Almost half of the participants at the pre-conference were Ph.D. candidates from ten different countries, who presented their projects and papers and got their credits.

As conference organizers, our impression is that all the participants, whether they attended the pre-conference and/or the conference itself, were interested in the main conference theme in one way or another. Admittedly, the conference’s theme was broad and its different components – sustainability, interdisciplinarity and transformative change – are interconnected. These components were chosen because they strongly reflect Bhaskar’s understanding of the crisis system as outlined in his posthumous book Enlightened Common Sense (2016). We also chose the theme to address the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – in large part thanks to Margaret Archer who suggested the idea in Torino at the IACR Annual General Meeting in 2017. The conference sessions considered not only how critical realism can contribute to the realization and implementation of the Agenda and its Sustainability Development Goals (SDG), but also how critical realism can offer tools in critical reflection upon, and examination of, the goals. We addressed the ‘Agenda’ specifically in two panel discussions at the conference, with contributors from within the critical realist network and from outside. In organizing the panels, we worked with our university colleagues Robert Didham and Victoria W. Thoresen, from the Centre for Collaborative Learning for Sustainable Development.

Focus of the conference: response to the crisis system

The focus of the conference was how critical realism can respond to the crisis system. The fundamental question was: how can critical realism contribute to a more just, prosperous, sustainable world, both for non-human and human lifeforms? The crisis system refers to the poly-crisis that we face within the contemporary world, which relates to each of the four planes of social being. The most striking of these crises, as Bhaskar says, are the four e’s: the ecological, economic, existential and ethical crises. The conference sessions covered questions of sustainability as such, education, democracy, well-being and philosophy of science in general.

We also hoped that the conference would bring attention to these extremely important topics; with the objective of placing them higher on the academic agenda at our own institution, in Norway and internationally. For critical realist scholars, we expect that it is obvious why these topics are both important and need to be discussed. It might also be obvious to critical realists that the topics relate to each other in many ways. Several critical realists have contributed to the growing academic literature in this interdisciplinary field.

Sustainability is still not yet enough of a priority

However, in the Norwegian academic community, whilst sustainable development is often mentioned, it is not ‘on the agenda’ to the degree that we would expect and hope for. Similarly, sustainable development is a well-known term in our country – indeed an earlier prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, chaired the Brundtland committee which brought the term ‘sustainability’ to the international table through its the report Our Common Future in 1987 – nevertheless, more than thirty years later, we still wonder whether sustainable development really is a political priority.

The philosophy of deep ecology has held a strong position among several Norwegian scholars; and students in the disciplines of philosophy and social sciences frequently refer to these ideas in their studies. Nevertheless, although the link from the field of philosophy to academic interests in sustainable development is clear-cut, we find that contemporary teaching-plans and literature lists do not focus on sustainable development to the degree one would expect, in light of the growing global crisis.

Encouragingly, a new curriculum is on the doorstep for implementation in Norwegian schools and ‘sustainable development’ is one among its three core, interdisciplinary themes (the other two are ‘health and life skills’, and ‘democracy and citizenship’). In this context, the perspectives from Chikamori, Tanimura and Ueno and from Restad in this special issue should be of particular interest for scholars and teachers who are seeking for fruitful perspectives on learning and education for sustainable development. We believe that critical realist perspectives are a vital theoretical contribution to understanding the depth of the changes schools must undergo to realize sustainable development.

Critical realism is not yet fully established in Norwegian universities

Critical realism is also ‘shining with its absence’ in many places. Whilst, for several years, Norwegian students and scholars in the discipline of social geography have made use of critical realistic thinking, in many other disciplines, critical realism is unknown. At our own institution, critical realism has been taught for about 10 years. However, this is still very much dependent on the preferences of the individual scholars responsible for the different courses; there is no established structure at our institution that would result in the systematic introduction of students to critical realistic philosophy. We have learned from other institutions that this is the case in other places too. On the positive side, an increasing number of Ph.D. candidates are interested in critical realism because they find that it provides a useful way to approach their research projects.

In this context – of both the absence of critical realism and its growing presence – it is interesting that Norway heads the list of the Top Countries by Downloads 2018 in this very journal, Journal of Critical Realism. As guest-editors for this special issue, we hope that we might contribute to a further increase of the download statistics. We believe that the papers presented in this special issue should be of interest to a broad audience. Before giving a short introduction to each paper, some of the (other) critical realist work currently happening in Norway is worth mentioning.

Norwegian contributions to the critical realist literature

To avoid the risk of omitting important contributions, we mention here only those contributors who also presented at the 2018 conference. One important contribution to the critical realist literature is the work of Petter Næss, professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who edited the book Crisis System: A Critical Realist and Environmental Critique of Economics and the Economy, together with Leigh Price (Næss and Price 2016). Næss has published other books and several articles on sustainable urban development, transport, planning theory and philosophy of science. The book Critical Realism for Welfare Professions is another important contribution to the critical realist literature, edited by Associate Professor Monika Kjørstad and Professor May-Britt Solem, at OsloMet (Kjørstad and Solem 2018). This book brings critical realism metatheory to the field of social work and welfare professions and provides metatheoretical reflections on social work, in terms of both research and practice. Other work in progress is directed towards Norwegian readers of critical realism. Norwegian-language texts on critical realism are more and less absent, and Trond Gansmo Jakobsen (unpublished) is in the process of filling this gap by developing a historical review of the philosophy of science up to critical realism and a presentation of the basic and dialectic phases of critical realism. Eirin Annamo is currently developing a theoretical integration of critical realism meta-reality and transformative learning theory in her PhD-project, finishing this year.

Introduction to the articles in this conference special issue

The seven conference papers and contributions gathered in this special issue examine and discuss aspects of sustainability, interdisciplinarity and transformative change from different angles and make important contributions to critical realist theorizing in general.

As a keynote speaker at the conference, Leigh Price talked about the advantages of a stratified ontology for ecology. In her article, she states that there is currently no viable philosophy of ecology. She then fills this void by developing a philosophy for ecology grounded in Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. She calls this philosophy deep naturalism and in it she includes both: a model of the emergence of ecosystems, that she calls the Emergence Model of Ecosystem Resilience; and a novel definition of the concept of ecosystem resilience. With her contribution to this special issue, she gives ecology a firm foundation in critical realism.

Bert Danermark has over the years contributed to the theorizing on critical realist perspectives on interdisciplinarity and research. Worth mentioning here is the much-quoted article that he wrote with Roy Bhaskar in 2006 on Metatheory, Interdisiplinarity and Disability Research (Bhaskar and Danermark 2006). In his paper for this special issue, he builds both on this article and on his more recent work from Bhaskar, Danermark and Price (2018) where the authors outline a general theory of interdisciplinarity in which they propose that interdisciplinarity has four research phases. In Danermark’s chapter (Danermark, 2018) in the above-mentioned book Critical Realism for Professionals, he further elaborates the four phases; and in this paper, which he presented as a plenary lecture at the conference, he adds a new first phase, a planning phase. Danermark, therefore, offers important and useful advice for would-be interdisciplinary researchers, as well as a further develops of critical realist theorizing on interdisciplinarity in general.

The contribution from Alan Norrie is an essay, which was presented as a plenary lecture at the conference. Norrie addresses interdisciplinarity in his essay, not as such, but in a specific context. His takes his point of departure in Patrizio Guzman’s film about three women dealing with the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Nostalgia Four the Light, and considers the nature of mourning and melanocholia in light of this film. He discusses the complex relationship between the ethical states that underlie human rights struggles and human rights law in the field of transitional justice, and the political, legal and institutional forms which seek to express them. He employs interdisciplinarity in terms of moral psychology, ethics and psychoanalytical perspectives to better understand the complexity of the dual struggle that the three women in the film face: to mourn their lost loved ones, and to refuse melancholia. With this essay, Norrie also throws light on the complexity of the relationship between social and individual transformative processes.

Kensuke Chikamori, Chie Tanimura and Masae Ueno provide a paper with practical and theoretical guidance for teachers of education for sustainable development. Where reflections on sustainable development sometimes can be abstract and general, they turn to the opposite and suggest a concrete and theoretical well-founded pedagogical perspective. According to the three authors, education for sustainable development appears to be difficult for teachers to reconcile with the practical meaning of education for sustainable development (ESD). They state that it is necessary to absent any absence through an ontological clarification of ‘What ESD is’. They are doing so through a conceptualization of ESD as a process of socialization in which students are seen as creative human agents. They further employ the Transformational Model of Education for Sustainable Development from Bhaskar, as a practical guide for implementation of ESD.

Frode Restad asks the fundamental question of how we might to re-vision education as a protective force against unsustainable development through a better theory of learning. He considers the recent Norwegian curriculum, already mentioned in this introduction, and uses this as a backdrop for discussing how a critical realist ontology can contribute fertile grounds for a learning theory which solves the dichotomous relation between competence and bildung in research, policy and school leadership of today. His point of departure is that there is an absence of a coherent explanatory theory of learning; and that the longstanding dichotomous theoretical dispute –between, on the one hand, ‘competence’ and, on the other hand ‘bildung’ – supports dichotomous theoretical positions in research, resulting in a short-sighted cherry-picking approach to policy and negative instrumentalist approaches in schools.

Cecilia de Bernardi explores the conceptualization of authenticity and culture from a critical realist perspective. Her overlying object is to conceptualize authenticity and culture in a way that produces a positive effect on the tourism of Sámi people, which means involving the Sámi in negotiations to find a satisfactory balance between the different dimensions of Sámi identity, the tourist industry and the wishes of the tourists. In this way, her paper gives important insights into the complex relationship between possibilities for sustainable tourism and identity, authenticity and culture. She counters the postmodern scepticism of labels by suggesting that it is possible to use labels about Sámi authenticity in a way that is respectful of Sámi culture but also supports the tourist activities upon which many of the Sámi people depend for their livelihood.

In her paper, Tone Skinningsrud contributes to critical realist theorizing in general, by focusing on conceptualization and real definitions in the context of Archer’s concept of educational systems, centralized and decentralized. She shows that Archer’s definition of a state educational system is a real definition of such system, in the sense that it has explanatory power due to its identification of mechanisms. She examines examples of the recent analysis of educational development in Norway in order to demonstrate how Archer’s definition differs from mainstream conceptions and provides greater explanatory power, which also entails exercising judgemental rationality.

Conclusion

All together, we hope that these contributions provide important examples from the conference in 2018 and contribute to the continuing focus on the important themes of sustainability, interdisciplinarity and transformative change. Thanks to the editor of Journal of Critical Realism, Leigh Price, for inviting us as guest-editors of this special issue and for significant help with the editorial process.