Immagining Environment: The role of Social Representations in the Social Construction of Nature

The history of research on environment based on social representations can be told as a story of success because of the continuous growing of published references along 50 years and because of its dissemination in different geographical and disciplinary contexts. But this story is not free of pitfalls, failures and rebirths because of its links to other approaches to representations in the social sciences. These failures are related to the theory’s specificity, its social scope and its social relevance. The corpus of research has 691 bibliographic references that have been analysed as part of a broader research project which is devoted to taking stock and analysing the literature on the theory of social representations. The research has been conducted in the framework of the Joint European/International Doctorate on Social Representations and Communication co-ordinated by the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. A metatheoretical analysis of the theory, and three case studies of its implementation constructed around their ontological assumptions of environment founded on a preliminary meta-analysis, show how a general lack of consistency in taking profit of the specificities of social representations among other representational approaches, a neglecting of the process of objectification, and an increasingly psychological anchorage of social representations in cognitive aspects have contributed to the decrease of the critical capacity of research conducted within this framework and have kept studies based on this theoretical frame away from the main debates in environmental, rural and urban studies. However, insights coming from other social sciences, such as geography, communication and cultural studies, regarded as being in the periphery of the theory, have acquired relevance and have redirected the research on environment and social representations to a more social and transdisciplinary approach. After some years of failure on approaching the process of social construction of environmental reality, both physically and symbolically, a new generation of scholars have rediscovered the strength of the concepts stated in the theory of social representations to analyse the social construction of the environmental problems that we face today.