Dissertation Overview Flashcards
What’s your dissertation about - intro
The climate crisis requires that we significantly change how we do things in all sorts of domains.
One of these is the food system. Our industrial food system is a big contributor to the climate crisis, and it is also one of the first to be seriously impacted by the climate changes we are already experiencing.
My PhD asks how we can make viable an environmentally and socially sustainable alternative to the dominant industrial food production and distribution system.
What’s your dissertation about - method and context
I do this through primarily activist ethnographies of alternative organizations.
Alternative organizations operate outside of or against hegemonic systems (e.g. capitalism).
If we believe our difficulties in addressing the climate crisis are connected to certain hegemonic systems, alt orgs are interesting windows into possible alternative systems.
What’s your dissertation about - key concepts
- Community-based organizing – organizing from the bottom up in self-organized systems, where communities develop policies that are appropriate and customized to the local scale
- Democracy – as a way of making our climate solutions responsive to local-level specificities and justice implications
- Technology – how modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can make new forms of democracy possible
What’s your dissertation about -community-based organizing
organizing from the bottom up in self-organized systems, where communities develop policies that are appropriate and customized to the local scale
E.g. prefigurative organizations, mutual aid groups, community-supported agriculture, participatory grocery stores, etc.
A way of avoiding the decoupling of organizational action from motivating intention, since the coordination happens at the same level as the intended effects
What’s your dissertation about - - democracy
as a way of making our climate solutions responsive to local-level specificities and justice implications
I highlight a dimension of democracy often overlooked: democratic revisability: keeping coordinating decisions regarding the means and ends of organizing continually open to modification by the relevant community
What’s your dissertation about - technology
how modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can make new forms of democracy possible
How modern ICTs can make possible democratically revisable authoritative text (similar to Wikipedia)
The limits of revisability as demonstrated by efforts to democratically develop complex multi-layered software
What’s your dissertation about - the problem
How to intentionally change unjust social systems
Starts from the premise the common coordination approaches – hierarchy, markets, networks – tend to become decoupled from their motivating intention
- community-based coordination is proposed as a solution
But community-based coordination seems to necessarily be limited in scale
- So the more specific problem is how to effectively change unjust social systems through radically democratic, community-based coordination (proposed solution – ICT-supported reflexive self-organizing systems)
What’s your dissertation about - theory contributions
Revisability dimension of democracy: requires that democratically-determined coordinating rules and procedures are forever provisional and open to revision.
The specification of a set of insulation degeneration risks dialogically enmeshed with their more commonly studied exposure degeneration counterparts (purity trap, organizational paralysis)
What’s your dissertation about - practical contributions
a model of how common ICTs might be incorporated into organizational practice to realize a degree of revisability compatible with effective coordination of complex organizational action – democratically revisable authoritative text
a model of dialogically enmeshed social transformation strategies and their attendant risks, which can be used by alt orgs as a guide to choosing their strategy and engaging with other orgs (as well as by scholars of alt orgs)
What’s your dissertation about - activist ethnography
producing knowledge that contributes to theory but is also useful to activists pursuing a more just society – activists with whom I am somewhat ideologically aligned
My research questions are guided by the concerns of the people I work with in alt orgs
- Spending extended periods “in” alt orgs, physically and virtually
- Informed by a critical realist ontology
- Conceived within the framework of real utopian sociology
