Beyond landscape: Bruno Latour, Alain Touraine and political imagination in human-nature relations

A recent and compelling discussion advanced understandings of political imagination and social change, calling for sociology to have a greater role in analysing the dynamics between them. The present article addresses this discussion through exploring Bruno Latour’s agency and New Climatic Regime concepts with regard to potential critical analyses of discourse surrounding the environmental and climate crisis, centred here on dualistic constructions of Nature and society’s relation to it represented by a ‘landscape’ lens. It creates a novel conversation between Latour and Alain Touraine’s focus on social conflict, where values and knowledge are contested. The result is a way of studying the dominant values, perceptions and practices concerning human-Nature relationships, as well as possibilities to challenge and re-negotiate these through social change in light of environmental and climate challenges, contributing to sociology’s positioning in political imagination research.