• Skip to content
  • Skip to footer
  • Accessibility options
University of Brighton
  • About us
  • Business and
    employers
  • Alumni and
    supporters
  • For
    students
  • For
    staff
  • Accessibility
    options
Open menu
Home
Home
  • Close
  • Study here
    • Courses and subjects
    • Find a course
    • A-Z course list
    • Explore our subjects
    • Academic departments
    • Visiting the university
    • Explore: get to know us
    • Upcoming events
    • Virtual tours
    • Chat to our students and staff
    • Open days
    • Applicant days
    • Order a prospectus
    • Ask a question
    • Studying here
    • Accommodation and locations
    • Applying
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Transferring from another university
    • The Student Contract
    • Clearing
    • International students
    • Fees and finance
    • Advice and help
    • Advice for students
    • Advice for parents and carers
    • Advice for schools and teachers
    • Managing your application
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Apprenticeships
  • Research
    • Research and knowledge exchange
    • Research and knowledge exchange organisation
    • The Global Challenges
    • Centres of Research Excellence (COREs)
    • Research Excellence Groups (REGs)
    • Our research database
    • Information for business
    • Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD research disciplines and programmes
    • PhD funding opportunities and studentships
    • How to apply for your PhD
    • Research environment
    • Investing in research careers
    • Strategic plan
    • Research concordat
    • News, events, publications and films
    • Featured research and knowledge exchange projects
    • Research and knowledge exchange news
    • Inaugural lectures
    • Research and knowledge exchange publications and films
    • Academic staff search
  • About us
  • Business and employers
  • Alumni, supporters and giving
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • Accessibility
Search our site
Baboshka-banner
Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics
  • What we do
  • Join us for study, work or visit
  • Who we are
  • What we do
    • What we do
    • Research and enterprise projects
  • Research and enterprise projects
    • Research and enterprise projects
    • Protest camps and climate activism
    • Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi
    • Migrant Journeymen from Afghanistan: Taxis, Life and Making Tracks in Britain
    • Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights
    • On Kandahar Street: Afghan migration to Singapore and the British Straits Settlements in the mid to late nineteenth century
    • Outer space as environment
    • Peasant Resistance, Food Sovereignty, and Human Rights
    • Homer in the laboratory
    • cli-MATES
    • Growing Heritage: The politics of heritage vegetables
    • Evaluation cultures in the political risk industry
    • FutureCoast Youth
    • IKETIS The mediation of climate change induced migration
    • Indebted-entanglements
    • The Isimila stone age project
    • Babochka
    • Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject
    • YOUR world research - Insecurity and uncertainty
    • The People's Pier
    • Emergent Authorities
    • Formulating implicity: contemporary feminist activism and critique in a neoliberal context
    • Here today: moving images of climate change
    • Mediating climate change
    • Power in outer space
    • Problems of participation
    • Landscapes of authority, affect and public memory
    • Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge
    • social-ecological resilience of a waterside community in changing water conditions
    • The happiness project
  • Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject

Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject

The International Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report   engaged with psychological and sociological knowledge base in some detail for the first time. In this research project (an individual monograph for Palgrave’s psychosocial series entitled Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject) Matthew Adams suggests that there is radical potential behind some of the headline statements made in the report. He unpacks some of this potential and considers how it sits with wider take-up of psychological and sociological knowledge in accounting for human responses to ecological crisis, and in explaining and predicting climate change ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’.

Adams argues that existing mainstream sociological and psychological approaches, and the way they have been taken up to inform interventions are insufficient. He proposes that to fully grasp the nature of the human response to ecological degradation a psychosocial understanding is required and he attempts to develop this understanding by drawing on contemporary and innovative interdisciplinary work in this area which has been largely neglected by the mainstream application of psychological and sociological knowledge.

The book’s focus is the ecological crisis, and the rise of psychological and social science explanations to understand the individual and collective ‘barriers’ and ‘enablers’ of sustainable behaviour.

polar-bear

Project aims

  • To question the translation of mainstream psychological and social science knowledge into policy and practice recommendations.
  • To develop a critical psychosocial approach to the sustainability agenda - that disrupts conceptualisations of the human response to ecological degradation, and the human-nonhuman nature relationship more broadly,
  • To explore how a psychosocial account of human responses to ecological degradation might translate into alternative experiences, practices and relationships.

 

Project output and findings

This project is currently in progress.

Chapter guide:

  • Chapter 1 Welcome to the Anthropocene
  • Chapter 2 Social science & the mainstreaming of the sustainability agenda
  • Chapter 3 Knowing & not knowing about anthropogenic ecological degradation
  • Chapter 4 The continuous circulation of collectively reassuring narratives
  • Chapter 5 Phenomenal dissociation
  • Chapter 6 Post-human, trans-species
  • Chapter 7 Envisioning alternatives at the end of the world

Research team

Matthew Adams

Output

Adams, M. (2015) Apocalypse when? (not) thinking and talking about climate change. Discover Society, Issue 18, March 2015

Adams, M. (2014a). Approaching nature, ‘sustainability’ and ecological crises from a critical social psychological perspective. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8, 251–262.

Adams, M. (2014b) Inaction and environmental crisis: Narrative, defence mechanisms and the social organisation of denial. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. 19, 52–71.

Hanna, P., Johnson, K., Stenner, P. & Adams, M. (2014). Foucault, sustainable tourism, and relationships with the environment (human and nonhuman). GeoJournal, 79, 2, 1-16.

Adams, M. (2012). A social engagement: how ecopsychology can benefit from dialogue with the social sciences. Ecopsychology, 4, 3, 216-222.

Partners

Back to top
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn icon

Contact us

University of Brighton
Mithras House
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4AT

Main switchboard 01273 600900

Course enquiries

Sign up for updates

University contacts

Report a problem with this page

Quick links Quick links

  • Courses
  • Open days
  • Order a prospectus
  • Academic departments
  • Academic staff
  • Professional services departments
  • Jobs
  • Privacy and cookie policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Libraries
  • Term dates
  • Maps
  • Graduation
  • Site information
  • Online shop
  • COVID-19

Information for Information for

  • Current students
  • International students
  • Media/press
  • Careers advisers/teachers
  • Parents/carers
  • Business/employers
  • Alumni/supporters
  • Suppliers
  • Local residents