It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this article, we propose a research agenda that advances the methodological and theoretical understanding of what SS can be, how it can be pursued and what it can contribute. The key focus is on knowledge structuring. For that purpose, we designed a generic research platform organised as a three-dimensional matrix comprising three components: core themes (scientific understanding, sustainability goals, sustainability pathways); cross-cutting critical and problem-solving approaches; and any combination of the sustainability challenges above. As an example, we insert four sustainability challenges into the matrix (biodiversity loss, climate change, land use changes, water scarcity). Based on the matrix with the four challenges, we discuss three issues for advancing theory and methodology in SS: how new synergies across natural and social sciences can be created; how integrated theories for understanding and responding to complex sustainability issues can be developed; and how theories and concepts in economics, gender studies, geography, political science and sociology can be applied in SS. The generic research platform serves to structure and create new knowledge in SS and is a tool for exploring any set of sustainability challenges. The combined critical and problem-solving approach is essential.
The focus of this article is on the legal profession's visual self-image of legal authority. It takes a departure from the themes of visual legal communication and discusses the relationship between text and pictures in the legal domain. The discussion concludes with a reflection on the consequences of the modern pictorial evolution. Bearing this discussion in mind, will the development of the ICT society (information and communication technology) impose new demands on the legal system, or will the law resist the sensuality of the pictorial turn? By describing and analysing 254 photographs produced by The Swedish National Court Administration (Domstolsverket), the analysis will indicate that the internal visual self-image conveyed by the photographs supports and maintains the law's stability and consistency.
Th e main problem discussed in this paper is that the legal system might be dysfunctional to various political participatory ambitions. Participation implies inclusion, but we see examples of exclusion that originate from internal operations of the legal system. Considering the many instances of participatory instruments embedded in legal frameworks in many sectors of society, it is important to ask what kind of problems the law might cause and the reasons behind these problems. With environmental law and regulation of genetically modifi ed organisms (GMOs), as examples, this essay analyses the paradoxical tendencies of the legal system to exclude citizens even when regulations have the purpose of including them. Th e scientifi c residence of this essay is sociology of law.
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