We are happy to announce that our CauSES project has a new publication titled “The Cod and the Cut: Intra-Active Intuitions”. 

Interest in causality is growing in sustainability science and it has been argued that a multiplicity of approaches is needed to account for the complexities of social-ecological dynamics. Sustainability scientists have drawn from different understandings of causation – for example in terms of regularities, mechanisms or manipulability – to try and explain socio-ecological phenomena. This paper contributes to this emergent research field by presenting a novel and largely unexplored understanding of causation in terms of intra-actions (concept coined by Karen Barad) and applying it to the phenomenon of the collapse of the Baltic cod in the 1980s. “Applying” means not only explaining the collapse of the cod but also exploring the implications of such an understanding of causation for transforming social-ecological systems. We thus hope that this paper enriches the field of sustainability sciences and transformations by exploring causal leverage points which normally do not receive sufficient attention.

You can find the publication here. Please get in touch with Tilman Hertz (tilman.hertz@su.se) or Maria Mancilla Garcia (maria.mgarcia@su.se) for any questions or comments!