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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
Richard Ballard is a Principal Researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (a partnership between the provincial government of Gauteng, the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand) and a visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is a geographer with a focus on social and spatial transformation in South Africa.
Clive Barnett was Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter, UK. His most recent book is
The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory (2017).
