discourses of Power - Foucault
(The discourses of power inherent in sustainability - how ideas have becomes naturalized)

What are the dominant meta discourses that govern these answers?

Translate to a set of questions/language that the community will relate to?

In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected and organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality (Foucault, M. The Order of Discourse, 1971: p1)

Embodying Foucault’s hypotheses that discourse operates around procedures of ‘prohibition, division, exclusion, rejection and the will to truth’, (1971) I would like to assert that the term sustainability is not a “neutral term”, but rather it is primarily received, understood, categorized and utilized under, within and around the dominant meta discourse of capitalism and is shaped through a subject’s age, gender and economic status. Therefore any understanding of the term is formed in the shadow of Capitalism. Provisionally, I would hypothesis that sustainability and capitalism are understood as mutually exclusive, oppositional, contradictory and therefore the term sustainability is subject to a great deal of acceptance or rejection. Moreover, I would also suggest that the term sustainability is dialectally formed through such opposition.

Sustainability has been an emerging concept since the early 1990’s, shaped out of negotiations that took place at the Earth Summit in Rio, 1992. The Bruntland Report (1992) encapsulates the concept as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of futures generations.’ This concept has been adopted by the European government and currently there is an attempt to translate and implement it though practice (legislative process) to industry and to general ‘lay audiences’ via local government bodies by way of constructing social well-being and encouraging new communities.

One of the problems of translating this concept to industry and lay audiences is that it is usually understood through the reductive term ’environmentalism’. The concept environmentalism could not and can not handle the issues that the term sustainability addresses - social, economic and environmental well being. Environmentalism tended to be understood as just ‘Earth centric’ whereas sustainability is understood through three pillars, social, economic and environmental. Within the environmental definition culture is excluded. However, it is also misunderstood as ‘culture centric’. It is therefore vitally important that this term is understood in its entirety. The term should be understood as three pillars that are integrally linked and cannot be split apart.

Predominantly, I would like to assert that a refined definition of the term sustainability could create a better synthesis of the opposing worlds of ‘capitalistic’ consuming and ‘sustaining’ rejuvenating. I would like to work closely by and with a community to address what their perception of sustainability is.

I believe my work is orientated around the ideas of Hart and Negri - ‘Empire’, particularly the idea that the ‘Multitude’or the general populous should seize the positive aspects of technology to remobilize, reassert and affect change. I feel strongly that communities can demand and create social change by being networked and sharing data, information and knowledge. A project of this nature should enable technology to be harnessed, personalized and made efficacious for communities - turned into wisdom (2002, Nathan).

I will work to create ‘wisdom’ that can be turned into visual stories with communities. This will allow them to communicate it to other and future communities. Communities would then be better equipped to co-ordinate, influence and practice sustainability. I will develop a piece of work that utilizes computers and the Internet so that the research can network with anyone, anywhere and in different formats. This will empower communities; give them a sense of autonomy and control. It will vocalize their voice as well as help them to shape and clarify ideas. To achieve this, I will adopt a Community-centered development’ (CCD) approach - a participatory process that involves members of the community (Preece, 2001). Through doing this I will be building the beginnings of a service-led product, but one that is built with the community, not just with the community in mind.

I have chosen two community-based working groups to work through. Once called Oak, the other A Community Portal for South Kerrier. Oak is an established community group whose primary aim is to implement sustainable schemes for the communities of South and North Kerrier. The group is steered by an Agenda 21 officer. ‘A Community Portal for South Kerrier’ is a new group whose primary aim is to utilize technology and software to encourage the building of new communities. One group operates through and is driven by the concept of sustainability. It should have a strong view of what the concept of sustainability is and how the concept is delivered and practiced within a community. The other group is driven by the concept that the Internet can help build a sense of community, especially in rurally deprived areas. It will work with some groups (it has chosen a total of ten) that have little understanding of the concept sustainability but are developing a practiced-based knowledge of what the benefits are that technology offers. At a later stage, to ensure that the research is manageable and productive, I will only work with two to three community groups within this group. Importantly in the first instance, I will have to elicit and illuminate how the concept of sustainability is understood in these groups. Is it present or absent? If it is absent how is it possible to introduce it