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Published in:
Introduction: A Wealth of Lived Experience Read chapter Read first chapter

2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

8. Lived Experience, Science and a Social Imagination

Authors : Dina Abbott, Gordon Wilson

Published in: The Lived Experience of Climate Change

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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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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previous chapter Lived Experience and Engagement on Climate Change
next chapter Rationalist and Public Action Theories of Knowledge in Climate Change Debates
Footnotes
1
Section 8.2.1 is adapted from a book, ‘Learning for development’, that one of the authors co-wrote with Hazel Johnson (Johnson and Wilson 2009: 20–26).
 
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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Metadata
Title
Lived Experience, Science and a Social Imagination
Authors
Dina Abbott
Gordon Wilson
Copyright Year
2015
Book
The Lived Experience of Climate Change

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17944-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-17945-2

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17945-2_8