Social change, environment and sustainability (with The University of Manchester)

In this episode of Future You, Dr Dan Welch tells us about the MA Social change, environment and sustainability at The University of Manchester

Participants

In order of first appearance:

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Dan Welch - lecturer in sociology and programme director for MA Social change, environment and sustainability

Transcript

Emily Slade: Want to make a difference to the future of our planet? A new course at The University of Manchester uses sociology and the theory of social change to understand more about sustainability, it's an immense task then you can find out more in this episode of Future You.

Hello, and welcome to Future You, the podcast from graduate careers experts Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ. We're here to help you achieve your career goals. My name is Emily Slade and in this episode I speak to Dr. Daniel Welch from The University of Manchester about a new Masters course the MA Social change, environment and sustainability.

In this episode, we'll talk about how sociology is the key to a more sustainable future, why Manchester is the place to do it, and how it fills the skills gap of understanding processes of social and behavioral change. Don't forget to subscribe to Future You for more, but in the meantime, let's learn more about the course.

Dan Welch: I'm Dan Welch. I'm a sociologist at The University of Manchester. I'm also part of the Sustainable Consumption Institute.

Emily Slade: Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today, you are here to talk about the Masters in Social change environment and sustainability at The University of Manchester. But before we get into that in more detail - your work focuses on the sociology of sustainable consumption and the sociology of the future. Can you just explain a bit as to what that involves?

Dan Welch: Sure. Sociology of sustainable consumption, explores how consumption in contemporary society can be made more sustainable as part of the wider transition towards more sustainable societies. So there's a focus as much on the ways in which our consumption is unsustainable, as on what more sustainable forms of consumption look like sociology of sustainable consumption builds on the legacy of sociology of consumption more broadly, that looks at what it means to say we live in consumer society and in a consumer culture, and how consumption becomes meaningful to us in our everyday lives. As for sociology of the future that looks at the ways in which how we imagine the future how our expectations and visions of the future condition, social action in the present, and thus themselves contribute towards shaping the future.

Emily Slade: So how does that tie into the course?

Dan Welch: Well, the focus of the course is understanding social change for environment and sustainability, obviously, a bit of a giveaway in the title. That social change is a central focus of sociology, and so understanding processes of social change is a unique contribution that sociology can bring to the study of environment and sustainability. We live in consumer societies, and in today's world, around 140 million people annually are joining what we might call a global consumer class, living lives in consumer societies. This is mainly in China, India, and East Asia. The energy and resource intensive kind of development that's led to consumer societies in the West simply can't be repeated globally without breaching planetary ecological boundaries, climate change most obviously. So understanding how we make consumption sustainable is therefore central to the challenge of a transition towards sustainability. As for sociology of the future, that can help us understand how visions and expectations of the future can be harnessed to drive that transition towards sustainability. And conversely, to understand how imagining the future of consumer societies can create barriers to realising sustainability. And that's just one of the currents of sociological thought that the Masters program draws on amongst a wider spectrum of ways in which we can understand social change theories of social and behavioral change at a variety of scales, from individual behavior change to organisational change, to change at the level of systems of consumption and production, such as food systems, or transport systems, and then all the way up to the level of society, economy, the state and then up to global institutions.

Emily Slade: Can you tell us why that's important? Why should this be studied?

Dan Welch: Sure. Well, in order to transition to a more sustainable world, which we need to do, if we're going to mitigate the climate crisis, if we're going to mitigate the crisis in loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, we need really, really profound social change. We need to change most of the systems that provide us with the goods that we consume. We need to learn to do things fundamentally differently. in many senses change our expectations of what the good life means away from the way that's been framed in contemporary consumer societies with a focus on material goods and acquisition. This is a absolutely immense task. And I suppose the thing that I stress is that sometimes the problems of sustainability, climate change, and so on, are presented as if they're technical problems as if they're problems that can be solved simply by rolling out renewable energy, making electric cars more accessible, and so on. But the contribution of Social Sciences to understand these things as socio technical problems is to understand that processes of technological change are always processes of social change. And so we need to understand the way in which we interact with these technologies. And we need to understand the ways in which social change takes place outside of technological innovation. So I think there's a huge contribution that sociology and social science more generally can make, to our understandings of the processes that we need to go through to transition towards a more sustainable society.

Emily Slade: So why study this at The University of Manchester?

Dan Welch: Firstly, it's worth saying that Manchester is a really great city to live in. It's got an enormous amount going for it in terms of cultural life, social life, it's positioned really well in the country, so it's a great place to live for a start. More specifically in relation to where the Masters is located within the university, the sociology department at Manchester's one of the best sociology departments in the country, particularly in terms of research that goes on in in the department. It's a very big and vibrant department. And all of the core teaching staff on the Masters program are also affiliated with the sustainable consumption Institute, which is a interdisciplinary Social Science Institute here at Manchester. So there's a lot of opportunities for people both focused on employability through the Masters, and those considering moving on to PhD study. And I think there's a wider sense in which The University of Manchester itself is engaged in issues around environmental sustainability. So you're

Emily Slade: You're ranked top in the UK for global impact against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Can you just tell us what that means?

Dan Welch: Yeah, sure. Well, firstly, probably best to start with what the UN Sustainable Development Goals are. So this is a set of goals developed at the UN level coming out of the whole process from going back to the 1980s, the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission that defined sustainability through to the various global summits on sustainability over the years. So this is a set of goals focused not just on environmental sustainability, but also social sustainability, that's to say, including issues of inequality, issues around gender equality, and so on. And in terms of Manchester's engagement, the University of matched as far as I'm aware, the only university in the UK, to have social responsibility as one of its three strategic goals. And then under social responsibility, a big element of that is environmental sustainability. So the university approved just recently this year new environment strategy that acknowledges that, quote, the environmental threats facing humanity and the other species with which we share our planet are greater than ever. And the speed at which we need to address them is immense. So in that strategy, the university commits itself to ensuring that students and graduates not only develop academic and professional skills, but also a sense of environmental, ethical, and social responsibility. So that's beyond programs which are specifically focused on the environment. So there's a real push now in education for sustainability or education for sustainable development as it's often called, to integrate a focus on environmental sustainability across the board. So as I say, beyond programs such as the MA social change, Environment and Sustainability so that everyone's studying in Manchester and all programs and units at Manchester have some recognition, some orientation towards the overall mission. I think one of the things specifically to do with the the sustainable development goals the SDGs, which is unusual, perhaps unique at Manchester as the universities worked to tag Its programs, its units, its research centers with the specific sustainable development goals that they contribute to. So for example of sustainable development goal 12, SDG, 12 is responsible consumption. So that's squarely what the sustainable consumption Institute, my research institute and the institute that teaching staff on the program belong to is engaged with, it's one of the goals, not the only one that the Masters can be associated with. So there's that sense of alignment with the different Sustainable Development Goals. There's also, it's probably worth noting, The University living labs program, which seeks to connect with partners in the community and business through the University College for interdisciplinary learning, which students on Masters in Social Change will have access to, and that allows students to work on sustainability related projects in the real world with organisations and businesses as part of their assessment. So I think there's a sort of number of different levels in which managers engagement with the strategic goal of social responsibility and specifically with Environment and Sustainability resonates with the new Masters program. Again, for another example, there is a there's a number of platforms that the university organises itself through. So interdisciplinary across school platforms, one of those is sustainable futures. So this brings together people from the natural sciences, physical sciences and social sciences, it provides series of events, seminars and talks. And it can be a way also for us as academics to to link up across the university, Manchester is a very big university and find people working on interesting topics that we might combine forces and do research with sustainability research is not always but often organised through multi disciplinary research programs, it's often important to bring together social scientists with natural scientists. And so a platform like sustainable futures facilitates those kinds of collaborations which are really important.

Emily Slade: This course in particular is designed to fill a gap - there is an under provision of social science, postgraduates with expertise in social change for sustainability.

Dan Welch: I mean, we could talk about the skills gap, specifically. The Masters programs equally focuses on those students who are primarily orientated to employability after the Masters, so seeing engaging with the Masters as a way to get a job in an area that they're interested in - as it is focused on those students who are interested in carrying on further research and going on to do a PhD.

In terms of employability, I think there's a vast appetite in organisations in NGOs, businesses, policy, for people with skills in understanding processes of social and behavioral change. But there is an under provision at Masters level of courses that focus on that. And that partly plays out in terms of where we see the way in which behavioral change and social change is commonly understood in the public sphere or within organisations, that's often through framing coming out of economics or social psychology, which has particular understandings of the individual, I suppose, and a focus on the individual. And while insights from those disciplines can be extremely useful, what they don't do, is look at the social level. So that's where I see this program, having a really potentially important contribution to training the next generation of people going into organisations with an understanding of social scientific understanding of how social change happens, how we might intervene in social change, the different levels, or scales of social change the different kinds of social change the different agents of social change that are important. And that's really, really critical for organisations to understand how they need to change themselves as organisations, but also organisations whether this is businesses or NGOs or government policymaking to understand if they want to make a positive contribution to social change for sustainability if they want to make a positive contribution to their activities becoming more sustainable to understand the social processes to understand the social context in which that happens, because without understanding that initiatives often fail, they often fail to deliver the kind of change that we want, or they can even backfire. There can be unintended consequences, and so on. So I think, filling that skills gap. So I think students during this course, who will come out with both an understanding of the substantive environmental and sustainability topics, so understandings of food sustainability, for example, or what micro plastic pollution entails understanding those substantive topics, but also understanding from a social scientific point of view, processes of social change how society functions, in order to understand how those problems have come about, and how we might tackle those problems.

Emily Slade: Do you have any advice for students looking to take on this course?

Dan Welch: Well, I think probably the first thing that I would suggest that students do is... so clearly students looking at this course are going to be motivated around issues of sustainability and environment. And I know from teaching undergraduates has a huge appetite, to engage with these issues, because they are, after all, the fundamental issues of our time, we do have both at Manchester and beyond, an increasing range of Masters programs looking at sustainability and environment. So I would say that I think the first thing that if you're thinking about doing this course that you need to do is sit down and look at all of the courses that you might undertake at Manchester or beyond, and where your particular motivation lies, both in terms of personal motivation, where you want the course to take you in terms of employability, or perhaps in terms of carrying on in academia and doing research yourself. And then the there's the specific focus of the different programs. So as I say, the real organising focus here is social change again, and giveaways in the in the title of the program. And you can look at the range of units, the range of individual courses that you can study, as part of the program to get a feel for what you would actually be doing on this program, what you'd learn what you'd come away with, at Manchester, we've got a strong focus on giving Masters students both core learning within our program, but also options to study units, optional units beyond those those core units. So students of the MA social change environment and sustainability, will also have the option to study any of the other existing sociology, Masters programs. So if you're interested in issues of race, and ethnicity, or if you're interested in issues of gender, or the family or inequality, all of which have really interesting connections themselves to issues of Environment and Sustainability, you can do that also, you can also look to the units from beyond sociology. And these are ways then in which you can build up your portfolio of understanding and learning and knowledge to think about what you would do for your dissertation. The dissertations a large component of the program. Overall, it's a third of the credits that students take. So thinking about what you are interested in studying what you are interested in researching for your dissertation, whether that's a case of having the opportunity to do a lot of really interesting reading around the topic, or whether that's a case of going out into the real world and interviewing people or looking at survey data. And so to get a feel, then for the range of topics that you can study on the course and how that's going to build towards your dissertation. I think some important thing as well. I'm very happy to anyone that's interested in taking the course considering taking the course, I'm more than happy to talk to you about the course help you think through whether this course is more appropriate than than other courses in the same broad area of environment, and sustainability or whether there are other interests that you might have that you could fulfill through the course. So I think that's yeah, I think that's the main the main things that I'd say is look at comparative courses, drill down into the detail a bit, look at the look at how those courses are structured, what they're going to ask you to do, what range of topics you're likely to be able to do on the course and how that might meshes with your motivations, your aspirations where you want to end up after the Masters.

Emily Slade: What are you most excited about this course?

Dan Welch: I think for me, what I'm most excited about really is bringing together a bunch of students who are really motivated to study the topic. So I mean, it's not an individual unit that's been developed here. So we've, we've developed two new core units for further program, we've also developed three new optional units, specifically for the program. So I'm really excited about what we can do in a year with students who are really motivated around these topics. And where that can go for people, both in terms of employability, because I'm genuinely passionate about filling that skills gap, getting people out there in into the world into policy into business into NGOs that have the understandings from social science from sociology, I think are really, really critical and equally, providing an opportunity providing a path for people who are interested in taking that a bit further within academia and doing a PhD. There's fantastic opportunities for people coming through the AMA, to then engage in the Sustainable Consumption Institute at PhD level. And I've been part of the sustainable consumption Institute since my PhD. So it'd be a really nice thing to do to see people coming up through the program, developing their own ideas for research at doctoral level as well.

Emily Slade: Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dan Welch: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Emily Slade: Thanks very much to Dan for his time and for that insight into the new MA Social change, environment and sustainability at The University of Manchester. Head to the university's website for more information on applying or follow the link below. You can search for other postgraduate courses by going to prospects.ac.uk. And to hear more from Future You, you can find us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Get in touch with comments, feedback, or suggestions. Just email podcast@prospects.ac.uk. That's it for this episode. Thanks very much for listening, and we'll see you soon.

Note on transcripts

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

Find out more

• Read about The University of Manchester's MA Social Change, Environment and Sustainability