Socio-Environmental Intervention Methodologies
Cod: 22222
Department: DCET
ECTS: 6
Scientific area: Sociology
Total working hours: 156
Total contact time: 26

The course methodology of Socio-Environmental Intervention focuses on analysis and critical reading of the theories and methodologies of research and intervention in the context of social and environmental field. Aims to context historically and understand the major theoretical, methodological and epistemological questions crossing contemporary societies, based on the environmental inequalities and challenges of participatory democracy.
It seeks to promote a critical awareness about the complexity of the object of study, especially working at social and cultural dimensions of environmental issues. It also seeks to highlight the epistemological and methodological challenges which places the production of knowledge and intervention in environmental contexts where citizenship and participation assumed as a vector both analytical and interventionist.

 

Methodologies
Environmental citizenship
Participation
Intervention


It is expected that each MSc student develop the following skills:
 • Present and analyse critically the broad lines of sociological thought, historically situated, in relation to theoretical and methodological issues in the context of environmental issues;
 • To analyse environmental citizenship and participation as a phenomenon that is intimately related to other phenomena that make up the structure and social and cultural dynamics  (whether from the standpoint of knowledge, or of intervention);
 • Addressing environmental issues at the macro, meso and micro levels, identifying the needs, capabilities and resources in specific contexts and to formulate proposals for action, mobilizing active methods of investigation and intervention.


 

1 - Overview
2 - The world in the twenty-first century-A "multiscale local " to understand and evaluate
 a) The context - inequality and globalization
 b) From regulation to social emancipation - between state, market and community
 c) plural epistemologies
 d) Global Justice and the Ecology of knowledge
 e) The Portuguese context - The semi-peripheral system
3 - Social and Environmental Intervention
 a) What methodological challenges put the environmental question?
 b) Participation, social intervention and civic involvement
 c) The environmental question as a complex social problem
 d) The problem of scales and dimensions of analysis (macro, meso and micro)
 e) environmental attitudes and behaviours - the paradox of Giddens
4 - Participatory Methodologies
 a) previous theoretical issues
 b) qualitative theoretical and methodological perspectives 
 c) Participatory methodologies: action-research - challenges and opportunities
 d) Problems of knowledge
 e) Problems of intervention
 f) The participatory citizenship - subjects as actors and researchers
 g) Practical experiences

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Evaluation is made on individual basis and it involves the coexistence of two modes: continuous assessment (60%) and final evaluation (40%). Further information is detailed in the Learning Agreement of the course unit.