Abstract
It is important to expand the boundaries imposed by social norms of attention around lived experiences in order to generate a broader and deeper knowledge about pressing social issues, such as climate change, and thereby regain power to set public agendas. For similar reasons it is equally important in academia to establish interdisciplinary endeavours between the scientific (natural and social) disciplines. A combination of the hermeneutic and emancipatory knowledge interests that are elaborated by Jürgen Habermas, and the sociological (which we reframe as ‘social’) imagination of C. Wright Mills are two complementary expressions of this broader and deeper knowledge. In either case, it develops through purposeful transboundary engagement of actors, that is, engagement between diverse lived experiences, between the different social and natural science disciplines, and between lived experiences and the scientific disciplines. Productive transboundary engagement is a challenge, however, requiring mutual trust, shared experience, continual reinforcement, structured discussion with trigger topics and facilitation.
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Notes
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- 2.
Note our use of the adjective ‘social’. Mills used the term ‘sociological imagination’, because his book is a polemic about social science and social scientists and what they should, and conversely should not, be and practice. He made greatest claim for the social science discipline of sociology. In our book, however, we are not limited to any disciplinary understanding, still less privileging one. The adjective ‘social’ captures perfectly well the kind of imagination of which we espouse.
- 3.
It is somewhat grating to read Mills’ directly here and elsewhere when he refers to ‘men’, ‘he’, etc. to donate people and she/her. We seek your indulgence for a book that was written in the 1950s by a man.
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Abbott, D., Wilson, G. (2015). Lived Experience, Science and a Social Imagination. In: The Lived Experience of Climate Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17945-2_8
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