Issues
Above all, I focus on climate and energy issues (which are covered in this category on this blog) site. Lately I have been leaning more towards the climate justice movement, but I also support efforts to tackle climate and energy problems through practical, community networks (for skill-sharing, for example).
Transportation and food issues also are major concerns for me.
With any issue, I tend to look for and challenge any injustices or market failures. In other words: I’m concerned about political-economics structures and dynamics (which I cover here and here, on this blog).
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Activism and academia
I am a Phd student and an activist.
Those sides of my life overlap with my weblogging, but what I do here mainly is something else.
What I publish on this blog is barely linked to universities and scholarly publishing. Although I think that this blog is a form of sociological analysis, this site definitely is not academic scholarship — which is different, in some respects. When I write as an academic (in training), I have to bring more focus and authoritative grounding to that university work (through scholarly citations, for example). I don’t try to maintain those scholarly standards on this blog. In academic publishing there also isn’t nearly as much room for imagery — to give a different sort of example.
Basically, those examples are my way of starting to explain how I see academic studies as a different mode of analysis.
As for activism -
I see this blogging as a way of providing some more perspective, beyond the narrower horizons of a lot of activist groups and projects. Sometimes activists don’t have an apparent sense of what they ultimately are challenging, or a clear sense of how they ultimately will try to bring about change, or an articulated vision of what sort of world they ultimately would prefer to live in. In short, I’m saying that activism can be too short-sighted and fragmented. I don’t see how that sort of activism can amount to much — aside from a mess.
Visions, principles, and analysis are important too, and I see this blog as a way to work out some of those questions.
