Participatory Networks and the Environment: The BGreen Project in the US and Bangladesh(Routledge Studies in Environmental Communication and Media)

Seeking innovative answers to global sustainability challenges has become an urgent need with the onslaught of environmental and ecological degradation that surrounds us today. More than ever, there is a need to carve new ways for citizens and different industries and institutions to unite – to cooperate, communicate and collaborate to address growing global sustainability concerns. This book examines one such global collaboration called The BGreen Project (BGreen): a transnational participatory action research project that spans the United States and Bangladesh with the aim of addressing environmental issues via academic–community engagement. By analysing and unpacking the architecture of BGreen, Hasan teases out the key factors that are required for the continued momentum of environmentally focused, academic–community partnership projects in order to present a workable model that could be applied elsewhere. This model is based around a unique conceptual framework developed by the author – “transnational participatory networks” – which is drawn from participatory action research and actor network theory, with the specific aim of addressing the common challenge of building evolving, stable and sustainable networks. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication, citizen participation, environmental politics, environmental sociology and sustainable development.

Table of Contents:
Foreword List of figures Chapter Introduction Theory and method Transnational political economic realities and its impacts on social transformation The networked architecture of the BGreen Experience Multi-media amplification of the BGreen Project Youth reflections, growth and sustenance of BGreen Participatory Network Conclusion

About the Author :
Fadia Hasan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Urban Studies Program in Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA.

Review :
"Can education through participatory research be transformative? This highly engaging and accessible book wrestles with the question by documenting how those traditionally researched (youth in the US and Bangladesh) became participatory researchers, built an international NGO to address global environmental concerns, and became leaders and activists along the way." -- Leda Cooks, Professor & Graduate Program Director, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA "Fadia Hasan tackles ‘big’ problems in a ‘big’ way. This multi-faceted and subtle démasqué of the architecture of participation in the case of the BGreen Project is a must read for both environmental activists and academics." – Jan Servaes, Professor Emeritus "Fadia Hasan provides an innovative comparative assessment of emerging transnational networks for social change involving youth organizations, academia, State, and the corporate sector… As the Global North and its surrogates in the South continue to advance an environmental and economic order that is not sustainable, Hasan’s task as an engaged researcher is to empower marginalized voices so that they are acknowledged in policy circles… [She] interrogate[s] the viability of paternalistic, market driven Bangladeshi and U.S. educational systems by confronting long established hierarchies of knowledge and exclusionary political practices. I expect this text will contribute to this line of scholarship, and do so with a great deal of insight." -- Henry Geddes, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA