Stories have always enabled people to make sense of the world and others, and this book encourages a radical rethinking of how we tell stories about climate change. This book proposes that, while climate change may be a result of policy failures and the incompatibility of capitalism with our finite resources, climate change represents a crisis of imagination—an inability to articulate a differentiated collective problem in ways that inspire, motivate and prompt individual and shared responses to larger but common goals. Considering the contrasting perspectives of writer Amitav Ghosh and theorist Mark Bould, this book reconciles their views for criminologists and all those concerned about—and working towards avoiding—catastrophic climate change.
Avi Brisman is Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.
1. This is Personal: A Preface to an (the?) Apocalypse 2. The Planet is Burning and Drowning and Dying: Who Needs a Methods Section and a Literature Review?3. Ghosh vs. Bould: The Great Derangement vs. The Anthropocene Unconscious4. Does it Have to be Either/Or? (Part I): Bould and “the Old’”5. Does it Have to be Either/Or? (Part II): Ghosh and “the New”6. Conclusion: Failure or Crisis?
'Avi Brisman is the proverbial Weberian switchman, creating the idea and worldviews that decide the tracks where material and ideal interests may run.' KuoRay Mao, Associate Professor of Sociology, Colorado State University