About Agonistic engagements and climate action: Inviting multidisciplinary concepts, methods and practices

This Collection publishes the outputs of the COST Action project "Social Sciences and Humanities for Transformation and Climate Resilience". This project aims to address the challenge of generating innovative and actionable pathways by engaging with the ‘critical practice’ dimensions of transformation. A ‘critical practice’ approach explores transformation processes in practice across different dimensions which include research, policy, business, community and individual practices.

This Collection examines conflict as a generative and transformative force that shapes collective futures. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism, we aim to challenge dominant models of consensus that marginalise dissent and depoliticise struggle. Instead, our approach foregrounds conflict as an essential condition of democratic life and social transformation, particularly in the context of intersecting environmental, cultural, and epistemic crises.
Focusing on climate and environmental conflicts, the Collection brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how such conflicts are experienced, negotiated, and expressed across diverse contexts. Contributions may address struggles surrounding green energy infrastructures, land use, conservation, environmental justice, and climate adaptation, as well as the lived realities of those affected by environmental disruption, including experiences of loss, trauma, resistance, and hope. Attention is given to both, institutional and policy-level conflicts, but also to everyday practices, narratives, and creative expressions through which conflict is articulated and contested.

The Collection welcomes empirical case studies, theoretical interventions, and methodological reflections from across the social sciences, humanities, and related fields. By placing different disciplinary approaches in dialogue, the Collection treats interdisciplinarity itself as an agonistic practice, asking what productive tensions, frictions, and disagreements between disciplines can contribute to the analysis of conflict. Overall, the Collection aims to advance critical understandings of how conflict operates as a driver of political imagination, social change, and the ongoing struggle over shared environmental futures.