Abstract
Climate change has until now been represented mainly by the natural, especially physical, sciences. While this has generated impressive insights and placed the challenge firmly on national and international public agendas, it is an incomplete representation (as suggested in Chap. 3), albeit a powerful one among decision-making institutions. Issues arise through the insistence of a deterministic ‘scientific method’ and with underlying assumptions concerning empiricism and positivist objectivity. Qualitative social science, with its mixed methods approach and positive view of subjectivity to reveal fresh insights, provides a significant complement to natural science with respect to the human dimensions of climate change. The topic, however, is too complex a problem to be represented by natural and social sciences disciplines alone. Drawing on the concept of climate change as a ‘wicked problem’, the chapter moves towards advocacy of an interdisciplinary approach that draws on disciplinary interfaces and grounds itself in everyday lived experiences. This approach has the potential to be inclusive of diverse voices and their experiential, as well as scientific, knowledge to create a more complete representation of climate change. Issues remain, however, concerning the politics of representation in terms of whose lived experiences are included/excluded and the ways in which they are represented by different actors.
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Notes
- 1.
Rationalism has a long history, being associated with the seventeenth Century Age of Enlightenment, associated with philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Voltaire. Simply put, rationalists draw on reason and its objectivity rather than emotions, experiences, subjectivity to explain and enhance knowledge.
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Abbott, D., Wilson, G. (2015). Representing Climate Change: Science, Social Science, Interdisciplinary Approaches and Lived Experience. In: The Lived Experience of Climate Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17945-2_4
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