Tom Smith

This article examines current approaches to wellbeing research in the social sciences, reviewing their underlying ontologies to explore which ‘being’ is implied in contemporary research on wellbeing. It critically analyses themes from the ‘science of happiness’ for their focus on a decontextualized and individualized subject and highlights the emer...

While practice theories and diverse economy approaches are widely employed by human geographers, the two literatures have developed in parallel, rather than in dialogue. This article argues that this has constrained understandings of postcapitalist social change and traces an emerging theoretical conversation between these traditions. It outlines t...

In recent years, scholarly attention has turned to the fracturing of global supply chains and the costs and benefits of reorienting economies to the local scale. While its real extent is debated, the term 'deglobalisation' has been broadly used to refer to this break from the expansionist neoliberal common-sense of previous decades. This paper cond...

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialis...

As ecological and social crises mount, academic work which explores the transformation of unsustainable socio-ecological systems has flourished. Surprisingly, however, there have been few, if any, concerted attempts to consider the resonances and divergences between two of the most prominent approaches to rethinking the economy as we know it: degro...

This commentary responds to Carr's thoughtful intervention on the work of climate crisis by, first, fore-grounding a pluriversal perspective on repair and, second, pushing Carr's work to more explicitly engage with forms of work enacting postcapitalist possibility. This could be framed as the move from 'transition' to 'transformation'. In doing so,...

In this chapter, we provide a humble point of departure for further action that drives social-ecological change by harnessing degrowth strategies. Current transportation systems need to be radically transformed, prioritising social justice and ecological soundness, and thus decoupled from various forms of exploitation. We explore strategies that ca...

The article identifies and critically discusses barriers for transforming the automotive industry into an ecological mobility industry in Slovakia and Czechia from the point of view of key stakeholders. The focus is on the actors in the transformation process and the obstacles they face in influencing the strategies and direction of such a shift. F...

"In this study, the obstacles and potential associated with a transformation of the automotive industry and the development of an ecological mobility industry are discussed in dozens of interviews with trade unionists, climate activists and representatives of the automotive industry from Brazil, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Spain, France a...

Proponents of post-growth economic alternatives have repeatedly distinguished between economic recession – a chaotic and harmful economic contraction – and degrowth. In the literature, the latter is often put forward as a planned and intentional process which increases wellbeing while simultaneously reducing ecological harms. This article pays clos...

This paper examines the economic practices of maker spaces-open workshops that have increased in number over recent years and that aim to provide access to tools, materials and skills for small-scale manufacturing and repair. Scholarly interest in such spaces has been increasing across the social sciences more broadly, parallel to a growing interes...

This paper draws on a case study of Achill Henge, County Mayo, Ireland, to examine the interplay between economic crisis, rebel creativity and shifting geographies of commemoration. Built in 2011 in a remote part of the west of Ireland, Achill Henge is a highly contested monument. Unfinished and under perennial threat of demolition, the Stonehenge-...

This paper foregrounds the under‐theorised figure of the policy maker in the environmental social sciences. To do so, it focuses on the case of “social practice theory” (SPT), a school of thought which has gained prominence in human geography and further afield in recent years. The paper outlines the context of environmental policy literatures and...

This paper presents empirical material drawn from a participatory ‘apprentice ethnographic’ research project examining the everyday geographies of a recovery-oriented wood workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland. It addresses two key literature gaps in human geography: firstly, empirically developing the concept of atmosphere within therapeutic landscapes...

This chapter examines the rise of well-being research, a leading contemporary means of shifting social analysis away from Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and which attempts to focus on the ‘social’ aspects of sustainable development in a way that doesn’t cost the earth. However, this approach has recently been critiqued by a broad range of researchers...

This chapter examines the calculative rationality displacing other ways of knowing and interacting with ‘nature’. Several increasingly dominant approaches to representing our environment are discussed, including the planetary boundaries approach, ecological footprint measures, ecosystem services (ES) and payments for ecosystem services (PES), and c...

This chapter traces both the intellectual foundations and practical applications of contemporary ideas relating to sustainability and development. Setting the scene for the rest of the book, it explores key contemporary intellectual framings of development, focusing on the renewed prominence bestowed upon the phrase ‘sustainable development’ intern...

This chapter examines how sustainable flourishing could be reconceptualised in ways which do not posit a radical separation of a sovereign and self-knowing human from their material environment. It begins by critically re-focusing on ecocentric and deep ecological streams of early ecological thought, before positing eco-phenomenology, new materiali...

This book examines how the way we conceive of, or measure, the environment changes the way we interact with it. It posits that environmentalism and sustainable development have become increasingly post-political, characterised by abstraction, and quantification to an unprecedented extent. As such, the book argues that our ways of measuring both the...

Recent years have seen the emergence of a novel type of community space around the world, labelled variously as makerspaces, hackerspaces, hacklabs, Fab Labs, and repair cafés. These workshops, often known collectively as the ‘maker movement’, have inspired considerable speculation regarding their potential to prefigure a more sustainable economy,...

Hackerspaces marks a brave attempt by Sarah Davies to get to grips with the dizzyingly heterogeneous set of phenomena subsumed these days under terms such as hacking and making. With particular relevance for cultural geographers, it explores this area through the diverse and rapidly proliferating spaces and workshops in which these practices find t...

This paper commences a geographical engagement with makerspaces, hacklabs, and other workshop spaces which form part of a broader ‘maker movement’. It examines the arts of inquiry and experimentation found at one such site, drawing on ethnographic field work at the Edinburgh Hacklab, and makes connections with emerging themes of interest to geograp...

Since at least the time of Plato, scientists and natural philosophers have actively strived for an understanding of hidden pure archetypes and timeless mathematical truths. But our abstractions and models bear the indelible signature of our corporeal expectations, in bacterial biology and beyond. Indeed, not only is our story of being humbled, rese...

Our ninth issue takes the form of a classic Dark Mountain anthology, with new work from writers and artists around the world - stories and essays, poems, images and conversations - responding to the accelerating effects of climate change, mass extinction and societal dysfunction. ‘Humanity is going to be humbled one way or another,’ write the edito...

Steven Vogel’s Thinking like a Mall, which continues themes developed in his previous work Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 1996), is clearly intended to provoke. His title takes one of the foundational passages of modern environmental writing, Aldo Leopold’s famous exhortation to ‘think like a mountain,’ and co...

The eighth Dark Mountain book is a special issue on the theme of Technê. Through essays, artwork and how-to guides, this issue confronts the difficult questions of our time: Where are these tools and technologies leading us? What does it mean for the natural world and our own humanity? And how do we live through this? Familiar names - Paul Kingsno...

My hope in this article is to demonstrate some ways in which anarchism is relevant for social science, specifically in a post-representational environment. To do this, I explore some of the productive links between the stance of anarchism and recent work in non-representational theorising in the social sciences (Ingold, 2015; Dewsbury, 2010; Thrift...

While steeped in classic analyses of technology, particularly the work of Lewis Mumford, Chellis' writings have always seemed uniquely coloured by her experience as a psychotherapist, bringing to bear a recognition of the interconnected traumas and fissures imposed by western civilisation on the human psyche. Having dedicated her life to the questi...