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This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia's humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as 'core' disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities.

This study looks at the case of industrial energy transition campaigning by a traditional conservation group in a regional city that hosts coal- fired power and emissions-intensive industry. We ask, what tensions do metropolitan campaigners find when communicating the idea of just transition and building alliances in regional places? How do they deal with those tensions? What does this mean for the task of developing ‘useable useful theories of environmental justice’ ? Our results illustrate the need to navigate three principal tensions: inclusivity, recognition, and equity. The case of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Gladstone reveals that as these tensions get worked through, the campaign goal is reframed as something other than ‘just transition’ and more akin to a local environmental justice campaigning. Ultimately, the ENGO now wrestles with the local difficulties of building energy justice politics on the scale and time-frame that climate science implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia's humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as 'core' disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the conditions facing labour within the renewable energy (RE) accumulation strategies of electricity capital. We draw on value-theoretical perspectives developed within Marxist and feminist political economy to understand how labour is being reorganised within the transition to RE. We use value theory to identify key dimensions of RE labour across the exploitation of wage labour and the appropriation of labour-in-nature. We apply this lens to data from existing academic and policy studies on 'employment' and 'environmental' issues in RE value chains. We connect evidence on formal labour market issues such as employment numbers, job quality, and labour organising and state regulation, with research on the socio-ecological conditions of possibility for RE across materials, land and households. We argue that value theory reveals how distributive and sustainability outcomes of RE are a product of how labour is organised in the energy transition. We finish with considerations for union and social movement strategy regarding the scale and scope of green labour agendas within and beyond energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section of New Political Economy demonstrates the value of critical environmental political economy for our understanding of energy, and possibilities for, just energy transformations. In the following essay, I identify key themes from the special issue papers addressing the political economy of decarbonisation strategies and potentially deeper green transformations in capitalist economies. These are: (1) the historicity of energy-society relations; (2) the crisis tendencies of energy capital; (3) the spatial re-configurations associated with energy transitions, and (4) the generative and contradictory dynamics of political contestation. By foregrounding these analytic themes, political economic analyses challenge much of the existing energy transition literature that describes fuel switches and technological innovation without thematising relations of power or the historical significance of capitalist eco-social relations of energy. In order to advance the critical political economy contributions to our understanding of energy transition, I discuss key analytic insights from this tradition into agency, structure, space and process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical environmental justice (EJ) scholars, focused on the role of race, gender, capital, colonization, and power as key to environmental injustice, argue that EJ thinking and practice should move past the traditional focus on liberal and state-based remedies. There are many scholarly accounts of critical EJ, but no systematic examinations of such views in practice. This paper reports on a survey of the meanings of EJ circulating among activists and scholars globally. Using Q method, we found strong agreement with this more critical framing of EJ – representing an important development of EJ as a global discourse. At the same time, we found important differences in terms of knowledge and standpoints, participation, the liberal state, EJ praxis, and the politics of disruption. We argue that this heterogeneity of perspectives, within a generally critical approach, reflects the context-specificity, evolution and expanding reach of EJ and reflects the field’s overarching ethos of plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is global‐North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas – climate change, HIV‐AIDS, and gender studies – through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern‐tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. A pattern of extraversion, involving active adoption of paradigms from the metropole, is widespread and institutionally supported. Major alternative knowledge formations have not emerged in these domains. However contestations of more specific kinds are frequent. Paradigms are adapted, criticism is offered, activism is engaged, capacities are developed and allegiances sometimes changed. The valorization of local knowledge, which goes beyond the abstractions of universalized paradigms, is particularly significant. Not stark subordination, but a complex collective negotiation characterizes the response of intellectual workers in the Southern tier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reviews the literature on gender relations and climate change. Gender analysis contributes to our understanding of: (1) vulnerability and climate change impacts; (2) adaptations in different contexts; (3) responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions; (4) inequalities in climate governance; and (5) knowledges and social action on climate change. Overall, the literature has established that gender relations are an integral feature of social transformations associated with climate change. This poses a challenge to gender-blind social research into climate change. Without gender analysis, we omit key aspects of social life in a changing climate. It is vital that the gendered character of climate change is recognized and further explored in the social sciences and humanities. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e451. doi: 10.1002/wcc.451 For further resources related to this article, please visit the . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist economics has taken up the concept of gender norms, most commonly conceived as a constraint on women's voice and gender equality. This contribution examines the concept of gender norms and summarizes key insights from sociology and other social sciences. Norms do not float free: they are materialized in specific domains of social life and are often embedded in institutions. An automatic process of “socialization” cannot explain the persistence of discriminatory norms. Norms change in multiple ways, both in response to broad socioeconomic change and from the dynamics of gender relations themselves. Restructuring of gender orders, and diversity and contradictions in gender norms, give scope for activism. The rich literature on normativity supports some but not all approaches in feminist economics and indicates new possibility for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost two decades since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising rapidly. We argue that the global climate policy focus on carbon markets has played a significant role in the failure to reduce emissions. There are 16 compliance carbon markets in operation across the world. Many more are planned, although there have been numerous problems with carbon trading, including ineffectiveness, weak regulation and implementation, instances of fraud, little to no emissions reduction and major legitimacy issues for governments and the private sector. In this paper we take a “strong” position, arguing that carbon markets do not have a role to play in a policy scenario that requires radical emissions reductions in order to avoid dangerous greenhouse gas concentrations. We put forward 10 reasons why carbon markets should not be the preferred climate policy choice, which we have collated from positions taken by grassroots social movement organizations, think tanks, NGOs and other political advocacy groups as well as individual scientists and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]