Greening Hegemonic Scholarship: Legitimizing Ordinary Knowledges with Environmentalist Humility


Alexander Painter, University of Windsor

Contemporary Social Movement Scholarship has been charged with not aptly attending to methodological nationalisms and anthropocentric, hegemonic values embedded in sociological methods. Abstraction between social actors and scholars has been pointed to as a major issue in the development of counter- hegemonic pedagogy. Critiques call for researchers to consider: 1) trends in treating non- academic knowledge as ‘lower status,’ 2) tendencies for formal theory to insufficiently challenge hegemonic categorizations of out-groups, 3) ‘humanist’ approaches thatcounterintuitively disparage ‘different ways of seeing’ social issues, 4) the modern researcher’s undervaluation of causes and rationale for social action, and 5) societal influences in the construction of out-group categories and stereotypes. In this paper, I will reflect on the work of Edward Relph, who proposed that we approach the development and transformation of Earth with an ‘environmental humility,’ or a deliberate respect for the inherent virtues of places and things. In this reflection, I advocate for an ‘environmentalist humility’ wherein the scholar seeks to challenge both academic and societally-normative hegemonic standard ways of studying and framing environmental activism.

This paper will be presented at the following session: