Reduced Carbon Emissions and Enhanced Well-Being via the Four-day Workweek

PI: Juliet Schor, Professor, Sociology Department

Collaborator(s):
Wen Fan, Associate Professor, Sociology Department

Project Brief:
This project addresses the relationship between working hours, well-being and carbon emissions. Following initial papers by Schor and collaborators, a growing literature finds a positive correlation between working hours and carbon emissions. However, these are macro-level, correlational studies which do not explain causal connections. We now have a unique opportunity to study this relationship at the individual level. Since 2021, we have led a global project studying organizations offering employees a four-day, thirty-two hour week with no salary reduction. We use a within-subjects methodology which involves data collection from organizations and employees before and after the trial. Our findings to date have generated enormous interest in this schedule change among employers and the general public.

We address three main outcomes: worker well-being, organizational performance, and carbon emissions. To date, we have rigorous results showing strong improvements in well-being. We also have strong results on organizational performance with moderately good data. However, we have been unable to capture robust data on emissions, which are complex to measure. We anticipated that office closures, fewer commuting days, and less household time scarcity would reduce emissions. Conversely, the potential for increased travel, higher household energy use on the off-day, and non-closure of offices predict higher emissions. Assessing these different scenarios has important implications for understanding the climate impacts of the future of work.

Our existing grants (from NSF and Russell Sage) fund ongoing data collection and analysis. The Schiller Institute Grants will provide crucial support to enhance our team capacity, enabling the development of new data collection methods to address climate and sustainability impacts. We will be partnering with an organization called Worktime Reduction whose CEO we have collaborated with since 2021.

Is Healthcare a Common Good? Philosophical Perspectives and Clinical Practices in Boston and Kampala

PI: Micah Lott, Associate Professor, Philosophy Department

Collaborator(s):
Tom Crea, Professor and Assistant Dean of Global Program, School of Social Work

Project Brief:
Our cross-cultural study investigates the attitudes and experiences of health care workers in Kampala, Uganda and Boston, USA. We are interested in how ideas about self, community, and common goods shape the practice of medicine in these contexts. Using focus groups discussions, we will explore questions like: (1) To what extent do clinicians see health and/or healthcare as common goods? (2) In what ways do practitioners define themselves as members of communities, and which communities matter the most to them? (3) How do these attitudes shape their practice of medicine, including their self-understandings and aspirations as clinicians, and their understandings of how medicine relates to other social practices and forms of expertise? (4) How does all this affect clinicians’ experiences of moral injury and burnout? As theoretical background for our empirical investigation, we will examine African and Aristotelian frameworks for understanding common goods, identity, and community, aiming to integrate insights from both traditions. By combining philosophical reflection with clinician focus-groups, we're hoping to build stronger frameworks for understanding common goods in healthcare, while also shedding light on how different cultural viewpoints impact healthcare delivery and the wellbeing of those providing it.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Climate Warning Labels on Gas Pumps

PI: Gregg Sparkman, Assistant Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience Department

Collaborator(s):
Stelios Syropoulos, Postdoctoral Researcher, Schiller Institute & Psychology and Neuroscience Department

Project Brief:
Effective communication about the risks that different behaviors pose for increasing anthropogenic climate change is important for raising awareness for the issue and reducing one’s contribution to it. Via a collaboration between the Social Influence and Social Change Lab and the non-profit Think Beyond The Pump (TBTP) we will examine the effects of climate labels on gas pumps. The main goals of this collaborative research effort are to (a) design a climate warning label which can be placed on gas pumps to warn Americans about the dangers of using gasoline and diesel, relying on extensive theoretical argumentation on effective climate communication, and (b) evaluate the how seeing this label influences consumers’ attitudes, beliefs and behavioral intentions. The resulting climate label will be evaluated through a series of experiments to determine whether it influences public perceptions about the risks of using/burning gasoline.

Investigating Young Children’s and Teachers’ Climate Justice Literacies

PI: Faythe Beauchemin, Assistant Professor, Teaching Curriculum and Society Department

Senior Consultant:
David Deese, Professor, Political Science Department
Advisor:
Hanquin Tian, Professor, Schiller Institute and Earth and Environmental Sciences Department

Project Brief:
While teaching about climate change is typically considered to be in the purview of science education, the nature of climate change as a transdisciplinary, socioscientific problem of injustice means that it must be a priority for all disciplines. One significantly untapped area for studying climate change is elementary literacy education, where a strong focus is placed on the development of young children’s oral and written narratives that allow them to make sense of their world and future actions. In this study, we will examine how children and teachers create classroom narratives of climate justice literacies. We aim to study how the narratives students and teachers create evolve through their engagements with children’s books about climate change and environmental activism. Climate justice literacies involve transdisciplinary engagements that focus on children’s awareness of climate justice through reading and writing to prepare them to engage in individual, social and environmental change. Discussions of climate justice literacies provide space to consider impacts of climate change, to analyze the climate discourses in society, and to create new narratives. Through this project, we aim to provide children and teachers with the pedagogical support and resources to analyze and question dominant discourses about the environment that are destructive to the climate. In so doing, we seek to nurture students’ and teachers’ creation of narratives that challenge these dominant discourses and advocate for climate justice.

Parks, Paths, and Dams: A History of Conservation and Infrastructure in Twentieth Century Patagonia

PI: María de los Ángeles Picone, Assistant Professor of History

Project Brief:
Today, many of us would agree that protecting nature constitutes a morally desirable policy. Yet, the history of conservation does not escape political, social, or cultural agendas. This multi-year book project seeks to historicize conservation in the region of Patagonia, straddling Chile and Argentina, through the twentieth century. It particularly delves into the intertwined history of conservation and infrastructure, sometimes at odds but often in conversation with one another. Writing a transnational history of conservation and its relationship with infrastructure projects requires extensive archival fieldwork. The SI-RITEA grant will fund archival research in national repositories in Santiago, Chile, sifting through the collections of development forestry, tourism agencies, state correspondence, and the Ministry of Agriculture, which housed many infrastructure efforts in the south. This research will allow me to produce an article in the next two years and a digital map of Chilean protected areas in collaboration with agraduate student.