- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
This week, after finishing my interviews, I began to pull together some initial findings. My interviews revealed that environmental activism often does not take a clear stance for or against neoliberalism. While the activists I spoke with often expressed “progressive” ideals, which frequently counter neoliberal logic, their activism did not always call for a dismantling of neoliberal systems, and sometimes their standpoints aligned with neoliberal thinking. In particular, they often placed blame on individuals – while they did not blame the everyday person, they often targeted individual politicians for denying or refusing to act on climate change.
The Green New Deal is a central topic of discussion in all of the interviews that I did, as a result of it being the primary project that the Bowdoin Climate Action group is advocating for. Because of its centrality to the activists I interviewed, I decided to look in depth into the Green New Deal to learn whether it aligns with or counters neoliberalism. I have found some scholarship that points out the contradictions in the Green New Deal, which has become fertile ground for developing an argument.
Currently, I am trying to decide how to narrow down my topic so that I can make a focused 20-minute podcast. While I would like to dive in to every interesting aspect of my interviews, I think I need to narrow it down somewhat in order to keep the podcast a reasonable length. I am not yet sure exactly what that focus will be, but it seems like the Green New Deal may become a central point, particularly because it allows me to expand my analysis beyond just Bowdoin students’ involvement with environmentalism.
Green New Deal Group. 2008. A Green New Deal. London, UK.
This document is the report by the Green New Deal Group that originated the concept of the Green New Deal. It lays out both what steps would be necessary to prevent climate change, what possibilities there are for how this transition would look, and the reasons why such a transition is important. While the respondents in my project discuss Green New Deal policy proposals that have been put forth in the U.S. government at either the local or federal level, the reason that I want to look at the original report is that it sets up the conceptual basis that undergirds the Green New Deal. The proposals for Green New Deals that have followed in policy arenas, including the national Green New Deal and the Maine Green New Deal, are based off of this document and so they share a conceptual framework. Using this document provides me with the best understanding of the values that the Green New Deal is based on, including whether they are neoliberal, anti-neoliberal, or conflicting.
Aşıcı, Ahmet Atıl and Zeynep Bünül. 2012. “Green New Deal: A Green Way out of the Crisis?” Environmental Policy and Governance 22(5):295–306.
This article provides a nuanced standpoint on the Green New Deal. Rather than frame it as either supportive of capitalism/antithetical to socialism, the authors seek to demonstrate where The Green New Deal aligns with ecosocialist goals and ideals. Their goal in doing this is to argue that the Green New Deal could be used as a stepping stone to a socialist agenda. This article may provide very useful analysis for my argument. This may be one way of explaining how even though the Green New Deal may show contradictory stances on neoliberalism, it can still be useful to those who want to counter the neoliberal system. Its anti-neoliberal aspects may be used to further an agenda that seeks to dismantle neoliberalism, while the ways in which it follows neoliberalism allows it to be accepted more widely and start to make changes within the system, which can eventually be used to change the neoliberal system.