The work of parenting for the environment: insights from an IE research study

This presentation concerns the early results of RE-Green project, a research funded by a grant from the STARS (Supporting Talents in Research) Programme of the University of Padua. It investigates practices of contemporary parenting focusing on an under-researched social movement: the international secular Humanists Movement (Pinn, 2020). Analyzing the pro-environmental activism of humanist parents, the project draws attention to the multi-layered work of negotiation of secular and religious ethics in which these parents are engaged in the public sphere and the private sphere of their families, and to their practices and discourses of intra and intergenerational socialization and sensitization to human responsibilities for the environment’s future. Breaking with current interpretations, the project considers the humanist system of meaning, different from that of religions, and humanist ethics, as emergent perspectives useful to reframe citizens’ environmental responsibilities and to draw on the novel concept of “green parental responsibilities” (Jelin 2000; Dobson, 2007; Smith, Pangsapa, 2013; McKanan, 2020). In light of the EU Green Deal and its pressing civilization transitions, the project advances knowledge useful for designing policy measures attentive to intersectional and intergenerational aspects in pluralistic societies. RE-Green combines different theoretical debates and methods within the framework of Institutional Ethnography, and it focuses on three countries (Norway, the UK, and Italy) to provide a database of international and comparative case studies, a series of thematic templates of models of negotiation, and yield training tools for environmental professionals, educators, and communicators. Overall, RE-Green considers the contemporary debate about secularization and the Humanist Movement in Western societies and seeks to contribute to it by providing a novel perspective on Humanists’ activism. This paper, by focusing on the early results of RE-Green project, takes into consideration the first two work packages, which intersect the following academic debates: (1) The first debate concerns the need to strengthen the ties between social movements’ studies and the sociology of social problems (e.g., Kucinskas 2018; Marvasti, Treviño, 2019), to re-situate social movements in a wider range of collective civic claims-making (also in the field of climate justice), and to develop new theoretical perspectives and methods of studying activism. Institutional Ethnography (IE) has still not received space in this debate even if it responds, theoretically and methodologically, to this need by focusing on the connections between micro, meso and macro levels of the social organization. Institutional Ethnography facilitates the analysis of Humanist Parents’ green activism in the public sphere deepening discourses and social practices. (2) The second debate intertwines family relationships with environmental sociology, indicating the need to unpack processes and possibilities of social change through empirical studies that focus also on the social practices of socialization to pro-environment ethics within the family (e.g., Jamieson, 2020). The Institutional Ethnography approach makes it possible to investigate parents’ ‘work’ of advocating and constructing intergenerational green responsibilities and how this ‘work’ is shaped by institutions. Linking this debate to Humanism is a novelty and it enables the study of how Humanism’s ethical focus on individuals’ responsibilities and relationships can be put into practice. Using the sociological approach of Institutional Ethnography (IE) by Dorothy Smith (2005; 2006), the project investigates respectively three areas of Humanist parents’ activism - in the public sphere (the social relations with different institutions), in particular, Humanist Parents’ claims-making against the disjunctures between environmental public policies and HPs (and their children’s) everyday needs; - in the private sphere of their families (the social relations with the next generation/s), in particular, Humanist parents’ everyday practices of negotiation of pro-environment religious and secular ethics and morals in the process of socialization of their children to green responsibilities; - toward the future (social relations with the future of the Earth), in particular the Humanist Parents’ possible definitions of (gender-sensitive) environmental citizenship and green parental responsibilities. The project conducts content analysis of campaigns, qualitative interviews, and diaries with Humanist Parents and adult children, and participatory action research to collect policy recommendations from Humanist parents and experts. The IE approach furnishes an understanding of Humanists’ discourses and practices in advocating for environmental citizenship and how institutions (outside and within the Humanist Movement itself) shape them. The study is focused on how the interface between the Humanist parents as individuals, the Humanist Movement as an organization, the family as an institution in contact with other institutions (e.g., the education system) gets organized in terms of the everyday social relations, negotiations and resistances between Humanist parents, other non-Humanist parents and other people involved in the process of children education. We are interested in advancing understandings of this interface in terms of ‘work’, that is how the ‘work’ of these parents is framed and impacted by institutional discourses and how they actively negotiate and/or resist these discourses. The concept of ‘work’ in Institutional Ethnography (Smith, Griffith, 2022) does not concern what people are paid to do, but anything that people do that takes time, effort, and intent. IE adopts this conception of work in exploring the actualities of institutions. It orients the researcher to what people are doing as they participate, in whatever way, in institutional processes. Therefore, this presentation discusses the first draft of the maps that we elaborated on from the fieldwork, which relates to the first two WPs, and it aims to stress the IE notion of work, as this concept has never been utilized to study parents’ activism in this specific social situation. 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