Memo25-Shifts+in+Sign+Systems

For this memo, write a few hundred words describing a critical discursive shift that you think is going on in or around your object of concern. A shift in sign systems is a shift in what is common sensical. Examples are in the reading section: Daniel Botkinand I. Scoones(in separate pieces) describe shifts in conceputalizations of nature; Steven Lansing's essays asks what it would look like for social scientists to shift to thinking in terms of complex adaptive systems. Gayatri Spivak's essay reads the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective as charting shifts in sign systems

What is common sensical?

-Petroleum is bad and making stuff out of plants is good -nature is a commodity vs. nature is both dynamic, interwoven and cyclical -certain bioplastics are best vs. bioplastic sourcing and characteristics should be based upon regional need and required waste collection options. -I've been encountering tension between environmental movements that doesn't commonly occur in what little I know of environemntal movements. One that I put into the HASS describes the pro-nuclear environmental groups forming in the face of concerns for global warming even as the modern environmental movement was partly formed out of a need to fight against the problems of nuclear waste, blackboxing of nuclear power, and potential meltdowns. -There has been a discursive shift in the approach that companies portray their goods and treat issue of how much impact their goods have on people and environments. Even if much of the efforts to be portrayed as a green company are simply green washing there is still a prevalance of interest that is shifting discourse. More importantly it is beginning to effect not only consumption patterns but also how investors are focusing their money.