An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene

Abstract: Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more‐than‐human actants—a process of co‐transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being‐in‐common of humans and the more‐than‐human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.     

CULTURAL AND SOCIAL DISCONNECTION IN THE CONTEXT OF A CHANGED PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

The context of the study was provided by the enforced relocation of an old coal mining community in the UK and describes the changes that were experienced by relocatees. The study is longitudinal in design over a six year period and this article is based on the qualitative part of the study. The old village had consisted of five straight rows of terraced houses whereas the new village was built in a curvilinear design with additional housing, occupying a much larger space. Reduced visual access to others not only diminished a sense of connectedness but also restricted an information flow which had been part of the functioning of the previous community, leaving indigenous participants with a sense of isolation. This unwanted isolation diluted the previous collective identity and weakened social support. In addition, an abrupt change in the community's socio‐cultural patterns occurred and previously learned privacy mechanisms were found to be inappropriate in the new setting. New values, priorities, lifestyles and overt materialism were evident and the data suggest that the earlier mostly collective functioning of the community had been replaced by individual functioning. It is proposed that spatial aspects provide constraints and opportunities for different behaviour patterns, highlighting the crucial importance of the physical environment and illustrating the essentially dynamic relationship between person, group and place.     

Nemo militans Deo implicat se saecularia negotia: Carolingian interpretations of II Timothy II.4

In II Timothy II.4, the apostle Paul forbids the servant of God to involve himself in saecularia negotia. While traditionally understood as a reference to commercial activities, for Carolingian thinkers the verse became a way to reflect on the political engagement of prelates and the relationship between religious and secular duties carried out by ecclesiastical office-holders. This article traces the changing significance of II Timothy II.4 in the first half of the ninth century, as councils and exegetes grappled with the question of whether there was a ‘neutral’ secular beyond the saecularia negotia prohibited by Paul?