What is industrial modernity and why should we care about it?
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Abstract: The deepening socio-environmental polycrisis has prompted an increasing need to challenge industrial modernity: the currently dominant assumptions about the natural environment, science and technology. However, the genesis and co-evolution of these assumptions has rarely gained comprehensive, systematic and conceptual attention in innovation studies. This is an important oversight given that the historical legacy of industrial modernity critically shapes the policy framing of current sustainability challenges as well as the design of appropriate policy interventions. In this presentation I seek to address this gap by 1) presenting a systematically validated inventory of constituent ideas, institutions and practices of industrial modernity; 2) mapping their emergence over the past 250 years; 3) identifying various recurrent controversial outcomes generated by the interactions of these traits; 4) distinguishing between three phases in the long-term evolution of industrial modernity. As a result, the presentation will be 5) quite awesome.
Bio: Laur Kanger is a Professor of Sustainability Transitions in the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, with research interests in transitions studies, history and theory of technology, and macro-historical sociology. He has contributed to the conceptualization of the Multi-level Perspective on socio-technical transitions, policy intervention points for facilitating transitions, societal embedding of radical innovations, the role of users in transitions, and energy justice. Thematically, Laur’s research has covered energy and mobility transitions, mass production, digitalization and industrial modernity. He is also one of the co-creators of the Deep Transitions framework.