Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance

by Alice Dal Gobbo

Overview

Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance is about those complex, sticky, but also open arrangements of bodies, objects, and plants that make up daily existence. The multiple and interlocking lines of a long capitalist crisis disrupt their normal flow: sometimes, they open opportunities for transformation, sometimes else, they foreclose horizons of change. In contrast with approaches that respond to environmental crisis by advocating “sustainable lifestyles” and “responsible behaviors,” Alice Dal Gobbo suggests that it is necessary to address the complex socio-material relationalities that constitute everyday ecologies. Beyond that, the book argues for their politicization, illuminating daily existence as embedded in capitalist relations of re/production. Combining political ecology and new materialist sensitivities, this book investigates the ways in which ecologically damaging logics are inscribed in everyday assemblages through their habitual rehearsal and libidinal hold. But it also points to how apparently banal acts of resistance embody and promote different logics, such as a logic of care and an ecological “aesth-ethics” of desire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey through the concrete matters and beings of daily life in crisis talks beyond this emplaced reality and dialogues with emerging forms of contestation and prefiguration that put socio-ecological reproduction at their center.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666920673
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Series:	Environment and Society
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	266
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Alice Dal Gobbo is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, Trento University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: Sustainability and Transitions “in Crisis”

Chapter 1. Everyday Life and Socio-ecological Reproduction: Crisis and Environmental (In)Justice

Chapter 2. The Capitalist Organisation of Life

Chapter 3. The Matters, Flows, and Beings of Everyday Life

Chapter 4. Alternatives

Chapter 5. Taking Stock

Conclusions. An-other Ecology of Desire

Editorial Reviews

"Alice Dal Gobbo leads us on an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated journey through everyday life ecologies. The author moves between cars, wood stoves, tango lessons, and layoffs, showing the entanglements of capitalist oppression and the multifold practices of intimate resistance. A must-read book to understand that, as the author beautifully states, 'there is no environmental sustainability without the sustainability of the desiring, fleshy, aspects of (everyday) life.'"

Marco Armiero

In Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance, Alice Dal Gobbo explores with sensitivity, insight, empathy, and resonance the everyday lives of ordinary people living and struggling with crisis and precariousness, while also trying to find more sustainable ways of life. She pays careful attention to the embedded reality of the necropolitical capitalist system through showing the many ways in which the economic crisis, often adding to previous conditions of vulnerability and marginalisation, causes depression, isolation, and suffering. She reveals the many ways in which the vital and desiring energy of bodies, with its permeability and openness to becoming, finds ways of repairing social and ecological relationships, of circulating again and generating everyday patterns that embody a heightened awareness of human nature as an ecological nature, that is, a mode of existence through assemblages that are more than human.”

Laura Centemeri

"Alice dal Gobbo has given us a sensuous ethnology, a passionate materialist sociology. Read this book; then read it again. It is teeming with ideas and charts new ground in the emerging psycho-social study of ecopolitical change."

Ariel Salleh