1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Social Change
The Routledge Handbook of Social Change provides an interdisciplinary primer to the intellectual approaches that hold the key to understanding the complexity of social change in the twenty-first century.
We live in a world of intense social transformation, economic uncertainty, cultural innovations, and political turmoil. Established understandings of issues of well-being, development, democratisation, progress, and sustainability are being rethought both in academic scholarship and through everyday practice, organisation and mobilisation. The contributors to this handbook provide state-of-the-art introductions to current thinking on central conceptual and methodological approaches to the analysis of the transformations shaping economies, polities, and societies. Topics covered include social movements, NGOs, the changing nature of the state, environmental politics, human rights, anti-globalism, pandemic emergencies, post-Brexit politics, the politics of resilience, new technologies, and the proliferation of progressive and reactionary forms of identity politics.
Drawing on disciplines including anthropology, human geography, political sociology, and development studies, this is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to researching key issues raised by the challenge of making sense of the twenty-first century futures.
- Apprehensions of Social Change
- Reactionary anti-globalism: the crisis of Globalisation
- The production of surplus populations: informality, marginality, and labour
- The Anthropocene: representations of change on ‘the human planet’
- Ecologies of infrastructure: materialities of metabolic change
- White Victimhood: weaponising identity and resistance to social change
- Using rights: European migrant-citizens in Brexitland
- The COVID-19 pandemic: capitalism, ecosystem crisis, and the political economy of disaster
- Reform and revolution: dialectics of causation
- Crisis and conjuncture: the contested politics of constructing crises
- Structural stories: on the transformational dynamics of context
- Innovation at the limits of social change: uncertainty and design in the Anthropocene
- Prefiguration: imaginaries beyond revolution and the state
- Catastrophe as usual: learning to live with extremity
- The state: catching sight of an object and agent of change
- NGOs as change agents: being and doing change
- Parties: the fall and rise of mass party politics
- The Economy: metaphors and models of social change
- Knowledge: wellbeing in global public policy
- Technology: determinism, automation, and mediation
- The people: between populism and the masses
- Citizen action: participation and making claims
- Activism: activist identities beyond social movements
- Imaginations of power: analysing possibilities of change
- Everyday resistance: theorising how the ‘weak’ change the world
- Contentious politics: politics as claims-making
- Civil resistance: theorising the force of nonviolent action
- Collective action: assembling issues
- Eventful infrastructures: contingencies of socio-material change
- Practices of social change: approaching political action through practice theory
Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett
Part I: Living in a world of change
Matthew Sparke
Nik Theodore
Noel Castree
Pushpa Arabindoo
Nicky Falkof
Kuba Jablonowski
Bue Rübner Hansen
Part II: Modes of Change
Donagh Davis
John Clarke
Clive Barnett
Lauren Rickards, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield
Anthony Ince
Nigel Clark
Part III: Agents of Change
Glyn Williams
Diana Mitlin
Nick Clarke
Siân Butcher
Jessica Pykett
Samuel Kinsley
Anna Selmeczi
Charlotte Lemanski
Daniel Conway
Part IV: Approaching Social Change
Kiara Worth
Richard Ballard
Clare Saunders
Jonathan Pinckney
Gerda Roelvink
Anders Blok
Daniel Welch and Luke Yates
Biography
Richard Ballard is a Principal Researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (a partnership between the provincial government of Gauteng, the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand) and a visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is a geographer with a focus on social and spatial transformation in South Africa.
Clive Barnett was Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter, UK. His most recent book is The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory (2017).
"This book is a stimulating and thought-provoking reflection on the implications and possibilities associated with living through an era of social change. It brings together such a range of thinkers and thinking that it forces the reader to rethink their own position on a continuing and regular basis. Each chapter makes its own distinctive contribution, but together they begin to define a field, with the help of a powerful editorial introduction. The book is essential reading for all who seek to understand the history of the present and to explore potential futures."Allan Cochrane, The Open University.
"From activism and the anthropocene to technology and understanding power this is an extraordinary compendium of analytic writing from global contributors and a variety of time frames – with interweaving plot lines involving modes, agents and analytic approaches. And many enlightening pathways for differently minded readers to find and follow."
Ian Gordon, London School of Economics, UK.
"Ballard, Barnett and their fellow authors have done scholars of social change a great service both in synthesizing a wide range of traditions across the social sciences, and in furthering the state of the art. These essays ask where and why social change might happen, who its constituents might be, and how to recognize it without romanticizing it. Any student, indeed any practitioner, of social change will be much the wiser for reading it."
Raj Patel, The University of Texas at Austin, USA.
