Bright Green:
Shifting Subjectivities and ‘New’ Environmental Values in Green Networks
Jay Hasbrouck, Ph.D. Social Anthropology
As technologies of social change, green networks[1] play an increasingly important organizational and motivational role for people engaged in environmental advocacy. In this work, I explore how networking practices among those who have situated domesticity at the center of environmental action displace the role of the traditional environmental social movements by shaping key discourses around environmental values. Tapping data from recent research with green homeowners and architects, I consider digital media and communications as they pertain to the formation and evolution of subjectivities and values within green networks.
As part of this process, I trace the paths of my ethnographic investigation in order to analyze how negotiations of subjectivity between ethnographer and participant play out in research where networks are pivotal. This includes addressing the challenges of deconstructing the role of cultural expert in what may be an increasingly democratized field setting, as well as the complications that arise from opening the range of roles research participants might assume. Critical to both are recognitions of the importance of subject control over ethnographic representation and the ways in which various modes of network communications condition the expression of environmental values.
[1] This includes online networks such as www.greendrinks.com, www.greenbuilder.com, www.ortns.org, www.treehugger.com, www.grist.org, as well as extensive informal social networks and information exchanges.
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