When
Where
The first Colloquium Talk of the semester will be next Friday, January 19th. Dr. Thomas Dietz will be speaking in Social Sciences Room 415, from 12:00pm -1:15pm. The talk will also be available by Zoom through the following link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/86758203501. The password for the meeting is: UASOC. The title and abstract are included below.
Achieving sustainability requires decisions that take account of uncertain facts and diverse values. Research on individual and collective decision making is scattered across disciplines and traditions. But it can provide useful insights for moving in a just way towards increased well-being for humans and other species and reduced stress on the environment.
Looking across work on decision making also suggests important research challenges. These include: 1) a greater engagement of science with normative theory, 2) addressing emergent issues, 3) better conceptual integration of structure and agency in a 21st century political economy 4) finding ways to articulate research insights with the needs of decision making, 5) processes for linking science and deliberation, and a 6) continued focus on the drivers of environmental stress as well an expanded focus on what shapes well-being. The contributions sociology can make to the study of well-being in the context of sustainability is illustrated by an analysis of environmental and other influences on subjective well-being in a sample of ~97,000 individuals across 97 countries.
Note: The first third of the talk draws substantially on T. Dietz (2023) Decisions for Sustainability: Facts and Values. Cambridge University Press. (Available online through the UA library/ Cambridge Core)
More information about Dr. Dietz and his research can be found here.