ABSTRACT
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.
1 Apprehensions of Social Change Part I: Living in a world of change 2 Reactionary anti-globalism: the crisis of Globalisation 3 The production of surplus populations: informality, marginality, and labour 4 The Anthropocene: representations of change on ‘the human planet’ 5 Ecologies of infrastructure: materialities of metabolic change 6 White Victimhood: weaponising identity and resistance to social change 7 Using rights: European migrant-citizens in Brexitland 8 The COVID-19 pandemic: capitalism, ecosystem crisis, and the political economy of disaster Part II: Modes of Change 9 Reform and revolution: dialectics of causation 10 Crisis and conjuncture: the contested politics of constructing crises 11 Structural stories: on the transformational dynamics of context 12 Innovation at the limits of social change: uncertainty and design in the Anthropocene 13 Prefiguration: imaginaries beyond revolution and the state 14 Catastrophe as usual: learning to live with extremity Part III: Agents of Change 15 The state: catching sight of an object and agent of change 16 NGOs as change agents: being and doing change 17 Parties: the fall and rise of mass party politics 18 The Economy: metaphors and models of social change 19 Knowledge: wellbeing in global public policy 20 Technology: determinism, automation, and mediation 21 The people: between populism and the masses 22 Citizen action: participation and making claims 23 Activism: activist identities beyond social movements Part IV: Approaching Social Change 24 Imaginations of power: analysing possibilities of change 25 Everyday resistance: theorising how the ‘weak’ change the world 26 Contentious politics: politics as claims-making 27 Civil resistance: theorising the force of nonviolent action 28 Collective action: assembling issues 29 Eventful infrastructures: contingencies of socio-material change 30 Practices of social change: approaching political action through practice theory
