Drawing on long-term research on East European environmentalism the talk addresses more general debates in the social sciences on the inequality of knowledge production and the context-dependent hierarchy of knowledge claims. It seeks to counter the scripting of East European scholarship as being on the margins of knowledge production. It demonstrates that research in the ‘Global East’ generates valuable insights that can inform theories with broader relevance beyond this region.
Rather than framing research conducted in Eastern Europe using imported concepts and theories based on Western, politically inflected environmentalism, this talk proposes a more emancipatory and productive perspective. This perspective highlights the significance of East European ‘already existing sustainability’ rather than privileging Western conceptualisations of sustainability that (implicitly) locate the benefits of sustainability innovations in the future. At the same time, it foregrounds ‘apolitical’ and everyday environmentalism embedded in informality and motivated by a desire for authenticity, ethical living and personal integrity.
Although these types of East European environmentalism are often invisible to scholars in both the Western epistemic core and Eastern periphery, they appear to be strikingly compatible with the everyday material and ‘post post-material’ environmentalism promoted by Western political theorists.