Symposium
Ideas in ALL is two years old! Our blog was set up on 3 December 2020, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. The blog seeks to engage an audience beyond academic journal readers – it aims to be relevant to a much wider range of stakeholders and to engage with public debate. A crucial element of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute’s blog – Ideas in ALL is to empower and give voice to people with disabilities, mental health problems, or chronic illnesses and older people, and their many and varied experiences of positive ageing. We also want those often marginalized from the benefits of mainstream society to feel that they can share ideas here. We strive to ensure that Ideas in ALL is characterized by accessible style, pluralism, openness and appreciation of difference.
The blog has been our way to ‘reflect on some old challenges, shed a light on new ones and feel our way in the dark of the unanticipated’, and, after two years, it has become a vibrant platform and the “pulsing heart” of the ALL Institute. We have published an array of posts that highlight new policy developments and frontier research, as well as reflect on current issues. We have also published critical and theoretical posts that redefine and broaden the contours of interdisciplinary research and explore new territories – often challenging neoliberal orthodoxy. Ideas in ALL blogs have been written by people of all ages and different backgrounds, and lived experiences of difference and marginalisation. Being embedded in the Irish society we have advocated for changes in Ireland, calling for action for revision of the Disability Act 2005.
We have also progressively reinforced our editorial overview, and, thanks to our wonderful and enthusiastic editors – Léa Urzel, Matthew McKenna and Hannah Casey and Anastasia Campbell– we have actively supported authors in the writing process. Our editorial team has helped people communicate their ideas more clearly and it has enhanced the rigour and credibility of Ideas in ALL, establishing it as an informative and insightful online outlet.
In the past two years Ideas in ALL traversed different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic and responded to the challenges posed by it. While we travelled to the “end of the night” and the worst of the pandemic is hopefully behind us, Ideas in ALL has also highlighted its lingering challenges, and opportunities. We are still in period of economic uncertainty, political turmoil, environmental emergency, and weaknesses of social supports. In this third coming year, we will continue addressing those challenges, making visible existing boundaries. We aim to stop heads turning away from unpleasant truths, to box outside the usually thinking contests. We will certainly continue to welcome evidence informed arguments, but also new ideas developed out of frustration, initiatives established from lived experience insights, and reflections form service providers and policy makers. We will keep championing interdisciplinary, human-rights based and empowering research.
Reflecting on our past two years and in line with our ambitions for the future, we celebrate this anniversary with a symposium on “sustainability”, which bolster our reflective commitment towards aligning with and supporting the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainability and sustainable development were for long inextricably connected to environmental issues and to the need for striking a balance between the environment, the economy and society. Contemporary thinking about sustainability goes beyond this, also encompassing broader cultural, political and social issues, whereby environmental considerations are coupled with concerns about labour and welfare standards, and more inclusive and post-colonial approaches. Sustainable development also calls for redressing the steady retrenchment of social protection, untenable economic competitiveness, and the diminution of cultural and bio diversity and climate damages.
Trond Ove Tøllefsen has defined sustainability as a “magic concept” in the meaning proposed by Pollitt and Hupe. He claims that sustainability is a concept covering “huge domains” and having “multiple, overlapping, sometimes conflicting definitions”, and connecting with many other concepts. He also suggests that the idea of sustainability has a “normative attractiveness”, bearing a “overwhelmingly positive connotation”, that generates and implies the possibility of consensus. Further, he argues that sustainability is a concept with “global marketability” in that it is known by and used by many practitioners and academics. Tøllefsen also calls for further research and reflection on the sustainability “buzzword” which features more and more frequently in official national, European and international policy documents, reform projects, and academic research. In that vein, our symposium seeks to understand not just what sustainability “means” but to recognise that its meaning changes and evolves as its relevance increasingly embraces new ideas: form biodiversity, to social justice, to means and modes of production, to inclusive education, to population growth, to … Ideas in All.
Happy reading!