Upcoming Events
Feminist Perspectives of Climate Change: Social Reproduction and Survival in the Great Caribbean
Diana Ojeda, Departments of Geography and International Studies and Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington
Catastrophic narratives of the end of the world populate climate change knowledge and policy. Seeking to disrupt these narratives’ enticement of fear and violence, this lecture focuses on the places where the world has ended many times. In the face of US military interventions and ongoing environmental crises, I draw from feminist studies to explore the overlapping geographies of dispossession and accumulation, extraction and exploitation, and tourism and militarization that have historically shaped the Great Caribbean, situating it in the frontlines of climate change. From a perspective informed by social reproduction, I further delve into the lived experiences of climate change in the region and the everyday forms of resistance to it.
SLCC
Date: May 18, 2026
Location: Online
Time: 15:00-16:30
The Politics of Land and Infrastructure in the Making of Indonesia’s “Geothermal Island”
Emily Yeh, Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder
With 40% of the world’s known geothermal reserves and second in installed capacity, Indonesia plans to become a “geothermal superpower.” Geothermal is particularly important as a baseload power source as the country struggles to meet its decarbonization goals. In this context, Flores island was designated a “Geothermal Island” in 2017, but development of geothermal has been very slow due to resistance from indigenous communities. This resistance has been largely dismissed and misunderstood by policymakers, development personnel, and government staff, who paint Flores residents as uneducated or manipulated by outside interests. In this presentation I will discuss four case studies in Flores where geothermal development is either planned or implemented. In doing so I will highlight the politics of indigenous ontologies of land, infrastructure, and articulations of indigeneity in their struggles.
SLCC
Date: May 27, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 16:00-17:30
Towards a Buoyant Political Ecology: Rethinking Marginalization for Coastal Climate Change Adaptation in the Tropics
Haripriya Rangan, Australia India Institute and School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne
Judith Carney, Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles
Judith Carney, Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles
The land-water dichotomy plays a key role in the prevailing global climate change adaptation (CCA) policy discourse for tropical coastal areas. This dichotomy is implicitly informed by a land-centred conception of property which regards areas that fluctuate between water and land, or ‘aquaterras’, as marginal and in need of development to make them economically profitable. By adopting this perspective, mainstream CCA policies ignore the diverse, vernacular systems of adaptation that communities that dwell in such tropical coastal aquaterras have developed through multigenerational and lived experiences to negotiate climatic and contingent uncertainties. We call on political ecologists to jettison land-centred, economic representations of marginality and marginalisation in favour of a ‘buoyant’, critical CCA approach which recognizes and builds on the vernacular expertise of tropical coastal aquaterra communities.
SLCC
Date: June 9, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
The Market that Cannot Know Itself: Missing the Forest for the Trees in Carbon Crediting Schemes
Javier Lezaun, Associate Professor, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford
Independent studies show that a majority of projects dedicated to the production of carbon credits in Mexico are victims of criminal extortion, or suffer materially from pervasive insecurity. Yet this predicament is rarely mentioned in the regular reports that monitor the progress of these projects, and the issue of violence is studiously avoided in public discussions about carbon markets in Mexico. This is striking, given the penchant of these markets for “transparency” and “auditability,” and their commitment to provide “social safeguards” to the communities that participate in the production of credits. Drawing on Claudio Lomnitz’s thesis of the contemporary Mexican state as “estranged” from itself, this paper explores the mechanisms that allow a market so invested in making territories and communities legible to “take its distance” from the conditions of chronic insecurity that shape its functioning.
SLCC
Date: March 24, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
2026
Atlantic Transitions: Freedom and Justice from Abolition to Climate Change
Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor, Department of International History, LSE with Austin Zeiderman, Professor of Geography, Department of Geography and Environment, LSE
This event brings together Jake Subryan Richards and Austin Zeiderman in a conversation exploring freedom and justice across Atlantic worlds from abolition to the climate crisis. Drawing on two recently published books, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River (Duke, 2025) and The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale, 2025), the discussion examines the transition from enslavement to liberation as an uneven, contested, and unfinished process that remains entangled with the political and economic order responsible for contemporary planetary predicaments. Grounded in historical and ethnographic perspectives, the event asks how abolition can illuminate contemporary debates about energy, climate, and just transitions.
SLCC
Date: March 3, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
Climate Methodologies: A Dialogue on the Social Life of Environmental Knowledge
Harriet Bulkeley, Professor, Department of Geography, Durham University
Climate change is radically reconfiguring not only the world we live in, but also the methods we use to understand it. How do we adapt our methodological toolkit in the environmental social sciences and humanities in response to the climate urgencies and emergencies that surround us? How are the human and environmental sciences at large shifting their modes of enquiry? What new forms of climate knowledge are emerging and with what effects?
In this dialogue, we take up these questions in dialogue with Prof Harriet Bulkeley, a leading thinker in the politics of climate change, who will discuss her own responses to the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by the changing climate along with SLCC organisers. This forms part of an ongoing series of conversations about how climate change unsettles established modes of inquiry and demands new ways of rethinking our disciplinary approaches to knowing the social world and its relationship with the environment. The discussion will be of interest to those researching the social life of climate change as well as those concerned with the contested politics of climate knowledge.
SLCC
Date: February 9, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 16:00-17:30
Research is a Land Relation
Max Liboiron, Professor in Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland
All research has a relationship to land. It can uphold colonialism, or it can resist it. Even well-intentioned projects in environmental science and activism often assume automatic rights to study or manage Indigenous land. That assumption comes from an inherited colonial worldview. Given this inheritance, the question then becomes: how do we enact better land relations through science, through research?
In this talk, Prof Max Liboiron will draw from their book Pollution is Colonialism while sharing new lessons and insights developed since its 2021 publication. These include the evolution of “community peer review” into fuller practices of community co-analysis, along with other emerging methods that reshape how research is designed, analyzed, and even written (footnotes and puns will make an appearance). Anticolonial science is not only possible – it is already happening.
In this talk, Prof Max Liboiron will draw from their book Pollution is Colonialism while sharing new lessons and insights developed since its 2021 publication. These include the evolution of “community peer review” into fuller practices of community co-analysis, along with other emerging methods that reshape how research is designed, analyzed, and even written (footnotes and puns will make an appearance). Anticolonial science is not only possible – it is already happening.
SLCC
Date: February 3, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
2025
Forests are Black Futures
Danielle Purifoy, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Forests possess mythical significance in various global cultural traditions—as mysterious spiritual ecologies and spaces of healing, transition, and regeneration through human and more than human life cycles. They also pose a core problem for modernity. Can Western ideas of social and economic progress, speed, and growth coexist within forest time?
This is a question for which Afro-descendant peoples in the “New World” were forced to provide an answer—through the clearance of forests and other native ecosystems to construct the plantation. But the shapes of their livingness, and spatial imaginaries of freedoms were (and are) bound up with their abilities to reclaim forest time as against ever encroaching plantation time across generations. With the U.S. South (the country’s “wood basket”) experiencing an expansion of concentrated forestland ownership and local place divestment—most recently through the emergence of the wood biomass industry as a UK/EU climate solution—I argue that a social-relational view of the forest from the perspectives of Black communities now experiencing forest loss and place destruction via the carbon market offers an important critique of modern methods to shape forest futures.
SLCC
Date: October 14, 2025
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 16:30-18:00
Inheritance, Ghosts, and the Future: Sociological and Life Writing amid the Climate Crisis
Alice Mah, Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies, University of Glasgow
In this talk, Professor Mah will discuss her book, Red Pockets: An Offering, which blends memoir, environmental storytelling, and reflections on migration, memory, and intergenerational legacies.
Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors. They make offerings of food and incense to prevent their ancestors from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune, illnesses and crop failures. Yet for the past century, the tombs of many have been left unattended because of the ruptures of war and revolution. Ninety years after her grandfather’s last visit and fifty years after her last relative died in the village, Alice Mah returns to her ancestral home in South China. While she finds clan members who still remember her family, there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.
Mah chronicles her search for an offering to the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, which takes her from the rice villages of South China to post-industrial England, to the Chinatowns of British Columbia where she grew up and the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves, which culminates in a crisis of spiritual belief: what do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?
SLCC
Date: December 2, 2025
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
The Point is to Change It: A Conversation Between Environmental Activist-Scholars
Laura Pulido, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics
Marco Armiero, Institute for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Marco Armiero, Institute for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona
This event will take the form of a conversation between Prof. Laura Pulido and Prof. Marco Armiero on their research and personal trajectories. Both have envisioned and lived their academic work in a dialectical relationship with political and social engagement.
Pulido has sought to challenge white supremacy by researching political ecology, social movements among people of color, and cultural memory. Armiero has looked at environmental issues—be they dam disasters, toxicity, or fascist ecologies—as if power matters, striving to politicize environmental humanities while employing storytelling as a revolutionary device. Both have embraced an explicit commitment to side with marginalized communities, approaching their academic work as part of a broader struggle for social and environmental justice.
In this conversation, they will reflect on their paths, intertwining personal choices with the wider development of the two interdisciplinary fields they have actively shaped. Faithful to the feminist principle that the personal is political, our guests will share their experiences while addressing the challenges of being activist-scholars. The session will conclude with an open exchange, welcoming questions from participants in a spirit of mutual support.
SLCC
Date: November 11, 2025
Location: PAR LG.03
Time: 17:00-18:30
Climate Methodologies: A Dialogue on the Social Life of Environmental Knowledge
Sarah Besky, Cornell University
Shaila Seshia Galvin, Geneva Graduate Institute
Shaila Seshia Galvin, Geneva Graduate Institute
Climate change is radically reconfiguring not only the world we live in, but also the methods we use to understand it. How do we adapt our methodological toolkit in the environmental social sciences and humanities in response to the climate urgencies and emergencies that surround us? How are the human and environmental sciences at large shifting their modes of enquiry? What new forms of climate knowledge are emerging and with what effects?
In this dialogue, two leading ethnographers of social and environmental change discuss their responses to the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by the changing climate. This forms part of an ongoing series of conversations about how climate change unsettles established modes of inquiry and demands new ways of rethinking our disciplinary approaches to knowing the social world and its relationship with the environment. The discussion will be of interest to those researching the social life of climate change as well as those concerned with the contested politics of climate knowledge.
SLCC
Date: June 10, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 5.25
Time: 11:00-12:30
Ecologies of Difference: A Discussion of Austin Zeiderman’s Artery
Austin Zeiderman, Majed Akhter, Gisa Weszkalnys, Jake Subryan Richards, Kasia Paprocki
The Magdalena River, linking Colombia’s Andean interior and Caribbean coast, has long served as a conduit for the expansion of colonialism and capitalism in the Americas. Now a state-backed megaproject seeks to transform the waterway into a logistics corridor.
Austin Zeiderman’s new book, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River, relates the river’s fraught past and uncertain future to global entanglements of race, nature, and capital. Zeiderman examines how racial orders shape ecologies and infrastructures, thereby upholding exploitative relations not only among human populations, but also between people and the planet.
Join us for a discussion of Zeiderman’s book in which panelists will reflect on the regimes of extractivism and inequality that continue to afflict the modern world.
SLCC
Date: May 14, 2025
Location: LSE, MAR 1.08
Time: 18:00-19:30
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Tao Leigh Goffe, Hunter College, City University of New York
Using the Caribbean as a case study, Tao Leigh Goffe traces the vibrant and complex history of the islands back to 1492 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus when the Caribbean became the subject of Western exploitation. Dark Laboratory takes hopeful and galvanising teachings from the islands communities to offer illuminating solutions to the ecological crisis. From guano to sugarcane, coral bleaching to invasive mongoose populations, Dark Laboratory is a lyrical, vibrant and urgent investigation into the greatest threat facing humanity.
SLCC
Date: March 4, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-19:00
The Ocean at the End of History
Jessica Lehman, Department of Geography, Durham University
This seminar explores multi-disciplinary ways of understanding the ocean as a recorder of history – as a space where planetary natural history and differentiated human history intersect and comingle. Thinking across a range of sites of marine knowledge production and environmental politics, I ask, what is at stake in different ways of reading and writing history through and with the ocean? This is a question with direct relevance to contemporary climate politics, as the ocean’s capacity to draw down historical emissions and store carbon on long timescales is increasingly touted as both at risk and as a climate solution. But the ocean’s role in navigating contemporary climate change is not separate from violent and barely-submerged histories of capitalism and imperialism. In these turbulent waters, time troubles notions of progress, salvation, and solution. Ultimately, the ocean’s temporal challenges in and to the age of climate change might call on us to rethink conventional understandings of history and even time itself.
SLCC
Date: March 13, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 3.24
Time: 15:00-16:30
Unjust Energy Transition: Vignettes from the COPs, Climate Finance, and a Coal Hotspot
Nikita Sud, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
As we move from fossil fuels towards renewables, the promise of just transition is to leave no one behind. This paper aims to interrogate ideas of justice underpinning just transition. Then it explores unfolding just transition measures in the climate vulnerable Global South. To pursue the first objective, a historical and political approach is adopted. I demonstrate the contested nature of environmental and climate justice claims that preceded the just transition agenda. Typically led by communities dependent on land, water, and the environmental commons for livelihoods and life, place-based struggles pushed against dispossession by developmental, modernist states and capital. From the 1990s, with the growing imprint of the climate crisis, states and businesses have increasingly entered the climate solutions arena. At multilateral climate fora like the UN COPs, states, along with businesses, finance, and technology firms, hold the mantle of just transition today. In this upscaled context, justice concerns play out around the distribution of climate finance, especially from the traditionally polluting Global North to the South.
Pursuant of the second objective of the research, and drawing on ethnographic and interview-based data, the paper traces the single largest climate finance partnership between North and South: Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership. In the shaping of Indonesia’s JETP, justice has become a tagline. The focus is on energy as investment opportunity—for the scheme’s international funders, and the recipient country. The trajectory of justice from ground-up, environmental and climate justice struggles, to multilateral climate fora, and high-profile North-South just transition programmes—shows elitisation and depoliticization. It is no surprise that a South-based Just Energy Transition Partnership is far from taking everybody along.
SLCC
Date: January 30, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 3.24
Time: 15:00–16:30
2024
Planetary Mould: More than Human Thermofixes for 1.5 Degrees
Jamie Cross, School of Social and Political Sciences and Glasgow Changing Futures, University of Glasgow
Moulds are environmentally ubiquitous and thermally tolerant, capable of adapting to rising global temperatures as well as the chemicals designed to eradicate them.
Whilst mushrooms and yeasts have received considerable attention from a multi-species and microbial turn across the social sciences and humanities, there has been little if any interest in that other, abject member of the fungi kingdom, moulds. Yet mould species are hotspots for interventions in planetary health, attracting enormous attention as emerging hazards and potential technofixes for human life at 1.5 degrees.
Around the world, from the walls of buildings to the walls of human lungs, and from fields to food storage facilities, pathogenic moulds are giving rise to new forms of public health surveillance and chemical controls. At the same time, experiments in biological and food laboratories see species of mould being reengineered as potential technological solutions to greenhouse gas emissions from meat and electronic waste.
This paper outlines a new field guide for the study of late capitalist temperatures, arguing that human relationships to mould are critical for understanding economies and societies in a warming world.
SLCC
Date: November 21, 2024
Time: 1500–1630
Archival Encounters: Writing on Black Ecological Memory
Tianna Bruno, Department of Geography, University of California Berkeley
The traditional archival record has long been critiqued for the absence of depictions of Black life. Moreover, notions of Black livingness in sites of climate and environmental injustice, often known as “sacrifice zones” are often limited. Port Arthur, Texas is in many ways a “classic” example of one
of these sites as this predominantly Black community is nestled within one of the world’s largest oil refining networks. It is also often in a state of recovery from intense hurricane events as it sits along the U.S. Gulf Coast. In this talk, I intervene in the normative archival record of Port Arthur through creative archival methods. I collaborate with community partners to co-develop this archival intervention that aims to foreground Black life and relationships to place and environment over time in Port Arthur. These methods include building a community-based oral history database, creating and installing a historical marker, and integrating environmental records.
SLCC
Date: October 10, 2024
Time: 15:00-16:30
Digging in the Drylands: Labor and Landform in Nature-based Solutions
Leigh Johnson, Department of Geography, University of Oregon
Contemporary adaptation initiatives hinge upon the deployment of a remarkable amount of human labor, perhaps nowhere more so than in the implementation of “nature-based solutions” – from planting and maintaining seedlings, to building earthworks and drainage channels, to removing invasive species and clearing debris. By whom this work should be performed, where, and under what conditions, are complicated questions for both project implementers and climate justice advocates. In this talk, I focus on labor performed on pastoral rangelands in dryland East Africa, where hundreds of thousands of soil “bunds” – earthen semi-circles also called “half moons” – have been dug in recent years. These landforms have been championed by NGOs, humanitarian agencies, and local governments as low-tech, easily scalable interventions for rangeland restoration and climate adaptation. Because the creation of bunds at an effective scale requires mobilizing a tremendous amount of demanding manual labor from rural populations, diggers are often paid per bund for their work. I explore how the logic of piece rate work shapes adaptation labor and the landscapes it produces. This case also crystallizes some key questions for adaptation labor markets for other nature-based solutions: How are standardized wage rates constructed? What is the relative value of volunteered versus paid work? How are remunerative adaptation jobs distributed? And most confoundingly, what is the construction of an adaptive landform “worth”, and to whom?
SLCC
Date: March 8, 2024
Time: 14:00-15:30
All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism
Patrick Bresnihan, Department of Geography, Maynooth University and Naomi Millner, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
This seminar take the form of a discussion with Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner about their new book, All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism (Bristol University Press 2023), which traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.
SLCC
Date: May 21, 2024
Time: 14:30-16:00
Angola Prison’s Black Ecologies
Justin Hosbey, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
The Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as “Angola Prison,” is the largest maximum-security prison of the United States, and a landscape of overlapping, sedimented injustices. A site of ongoing, horrific human rights abuses, the prison is positioned in the wake of both racial slavery and settler colonialism. The 18,000-acre prison farm is located in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, two miles from the Louisiana-Mississippi border. This talk integrates spatial analysis, my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in southern Louisiana, and archival research from the Angolite prison newspaper and other relevant archives to analyze the ways that people incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola Prison farm experience the damaging effects of anthropogenic climate change. By situating these insights within what Françoise Vergès has named, “the racial capitalocene,” this project works to understand the race and class stratified impacts of anthropogenic climate change more fully by asking, “what happens to incarcerated people when carceral landscapes face the climate crisis?” Angola Prison is a critical site for understanding what happens to those considered “les damnés de la terre” in times of environmental catastrophe, and for highlighting their critiques of the carceral state in a time of mounting ecological crisis.
SLCC
Date: February 8, 2024
Time: 15:00-16:30
2023
Durable Derangements: The Making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road
Nikhil Anand, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
In this paper, I examine the making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road Project. How might we account for the production of a highway in a climate changed city, one that it is situated on made-up land that fills an increasingly restive, rising sea? Thinking with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016), I draw attention to the interests, aesthetics and technologies with which the road and is made durable. I argue that Mumbai Coastal Road is not made with “rational” plans, designs and studies of urban infrastructure. It is mobilized by the aesthetics of modernity (Ghertner 2015) and particular “habits of thought” (Benedict 1934) that privilege, valorize and assume the possibility of bourgeois regularity in the city; a deeply felt orientation and mode of intervening in the world that continues to produce the climate crisis, both in Mumbai and beyond.
SLCC
Date: March 8, 2023
Time: 14:00-15:30
Seawall Entanglements: Contested Futures and the Politics of Staying in Place
Summer Gray, Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara
This talk casts critical light on the fight to keep place where it is on the shore, examining the ways in which competing logics of adaptation mirror and intensify political struggle on the ground. As attention turns to newer and more experimental “soft” measures modeled on natural processes, seawalls and other “hard” measures have become deeply contested. Yet both pathways involve frameworks of resilience that can serve to undermine movements for social and climate justice. Of all the epicenters of this struggle, two places are particularly telling in their stories of seawall entanglements and the politics of staying in place: Guyana, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Maldives, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Together, they reveal how competing logics of adaptation are being tested and negotiated, blurring the line between “hard” and “soft” while challenging the political motivations and assumptions that accompany them. In these frontline nations, seawalls are both physical and symbolic boundaries around which desires for permanence collide through waves of oppression, attachments to place, and anticipations of loss.
SLCC
Date: March 13, 2023
Time: 16:00-17:15
Amongst Tigers: Sentinel Beasts on a Climate Frontier
Jason Cons, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin
This paper explores the ongoing invention of the Royal Bengal Tiger as a sentinel beast of global climate change in the Bangladesh Sundarbans. It asks how the production of the tiger as climate sentinel shapes a broader network of politics and relations in the contemporary Bengal Delta. As others have pointed out, the Royal Bengal Tiger—the Sundarbans’ most famous resident—has long been a potent figure of global imaginations of imperiled nature. This is doubly true in an era of climate change where tigers and their habitats have become tropical analogs to images such as polar bears on melting icebergs. Building on classic ethnographic engagements with the Sundarbans tiger, this paper outlines a contemporary tension between visions of a global tiger and its corporeal counterparts. It situates the tiger as not only a charismatic beast making its possible last stand in the imperiled mangroves, but also as inextricably enmeshed in land, human labor, and a broader web of predation. The region is, at least in part, constituted with and through the flesh and figure of the tiger. I frame the making of the tiger as sentinel beast not as a misrecognition but as a creation that shapes conservation, development, and claims on the delta’s future. In doing so, I map how tigers are entwined with the production of space, risk, and agrarian change in Sundarbans.
SLCC
Date: November 30, 2023
Time: 15:00-16:30
Film Screening and Discussion
Achieving Justice when Stopping Oil: OFFSHORE Film Screening and Discussion
To limit climate change to 1.5°C, oil and gas production needs to be phased out in the near future. Next to challenges related to replacing hydrocarbons with alternative forms of energy, this disruption means for oil workers and regions to be confronted with the end of an industry that their livelihood and prosperity is depending on.
In this special event of the Social Life of Climate Change series, Dr Gisa Weszkalnys, Co-Investigator of the UKRI funded project “Fraying ties? Networks, territory and transformation in the UK oil sector”, sets the scene for the screening of OFFSHORE, a short film focusing on the situation of oil and gas workers that has been commissioned by the NGO Platform London. The director of the film, Hazel Falck, will join a discussion panel with Dr Gisa Weszkalnys, Gabrielle Jeliazkov, and Dr Connor Watt, for the final part of this event which will open the floor to questions from the audience.
SLCC
Date: February 8, 2023
Time: 17:00-18:30
Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews
Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies aimed at governing forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. In this talk about her forthcoming book, Collins will interrogate the implementation of the biggest and most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities, the United Nations endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates where conservation efforts would be expected to have a relatively easy path. Yet, REDD+ has been fraught with challenges. The talk will situate these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It will advocate that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization. Forests of Refuge shows that pursuing decolonization in countries shaped almost entirely by the colonial encounter depends on reducing deference to the sovereign state in questions of environmental governance; removing the market from its increasingly central position as arbiter of environmental and social affairs; un-disciplining the racialized subjects of colonial governance, and amplifying those ethics and ways of being in the world that are associated with pre-colonial and non-Eurocentric knowledge traditions. In developing these arguments, Forests of Refuge contributes to three ongoing discussions: the feasibility of increasingly popular market-based tools for encouraging conservation within the neoliberal conservation literature; processes of racialization within critiques of the Anthropocene; and the possibility of decolonization within the critical development literature.
SLCC
Date: October 19, 2023
Time: 15:00-16:30
2022
Can we Have Reproductive Justice in a Climate Crisis?
Jade Sasser, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside
Some climate scientists describe climate problems as problems of unrestrained population growth. Such discourses align closely with historical narratives blaming the fertility and reproduction of the poor, particularly women of color, for a range of social, political, economic, and environmental problems. In an era of ongoing climate crisis, can movements for reproductive justice and climate justice align? This talk explores the challenging ways population has been blamed for environmental and climate crises and how reproductive justice activists and scholars have resisted. From there, it investigates the possible ways social justice oriented approaches can help us navigate out of the reductive perspectives of population control.
SLCC
Date: March 22, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:30
The Greening Imaginary: From Garden Cities to Climate Justice
Hillary Angelo, Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
From California to China, self-described “greening” efforts claiming to address inequality and the climate crisis proliferate. But why are such projects—undertaken in the name of ecological sustainability and climate resilience as well as quality of life—being carried out in such a wide range of places with very different histories, ecologies, and cultural repertoires for urban life? Based on a study of a century of greening in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region that has been recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, this talk offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a global, contemporary phenomenon. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by a social imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature; that urban processes, rather than city form, explain greening’s appearance; and that contemporary greening is best understood as fundamentally continuous with past practices. Through an analysis of California cities’ climate action plans, it then highlights the same logics of urban nature at work in contemporary climate adaptation and mitigation efforts and explores their consequences, particularly regarding conceptions of climate justice and equity.
SLCC
Date: February 1, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:30
Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System
Jerry Zee, Department of Anthropology and High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University
In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?
SLCC
Date: March 8, 2022
Time: 14:30-16:00
Sedimented Stories: Fluvial Forces and Natural Archives in an Unstable World
Alejandro Camargo, Department of History and Social Sciences, Universidad del Norte (Colombia)
Sediments are materials that tell stories about the past. For climatologists, paleoecologists and archaeologists, sediments are natural archives that preserve particles of organic and inorganic matter accumulated over time, whose study allows us to understand the climate, environmental transformations and human occupations of bygone eras. For historians and other social scientists, sediments are a metaphor for understanding the shaping and accumulation of human experience in historical time. But what kind of contemporary human experiences are woven around sediment not as a metaphor but as a material that circulates and accumulates in the landscape and quotidian spaces? What does sediment tell about the future of those subjects whose lives are deeply intertwined with the flux and accumulation of this element? For many people who inhabit rivers, streams and swamps in the Colombian Caribbean, sediment is part of their daily lives and, therefore, it shapes their memories and visions of the future in the midst of disaster, conflict, and inequality. The sediments remind them of stories of the life and death of rivers and swamps, as well as the prosperity and decay of rural life. For these people, the force of rivers is the engine that animates sediment. Thus, fluctuations in fluvial forces can allow life, but they can also produce disasters and agrarian conflicts through the erosion and accretion of sediment. Although in the Anthropocene humans are seen as a dominant planetary geological force, for these Caribbean inhabitants fluvial forces are stronger, surpass human control, and bring about ruin, exhaustion and desolation to their lives. Despite spreading climate adaptation discourses and intervention promising disaster control and ecosystem recovery in this region, fluvial forces seem to unfold rapidly thereby creating uncertainty and risk in the face of climate change. This presentation explores the social life of river forces and natural archives to understand how sediment can tellstories about people, and how people tell stories about sediment in an increasingly unstable world.
SLCC
Date: November 7, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:15
Imagining Urban Futures: Adaptation and the Politics of Possibility in Jakarta
Emma Colven, Assistant Professor of Global Environment, University of Oklahoma
In 2020, the Indonesian President announced that the nation’s capital would be relocated away from Jakarta to East Kalimantan. His decision seemed to confirm what the media have already long been speculating: Jakarta is doomed. I reflect on the use and work of dystopian climate imaginaries, and what it means to forecast disaster and uninhabitability for cities that for many will continue to be home.
SLCC
Date: May 10, 2022
Time: 14:30-16:00
Late Acceleration: The Early 1970s Climate Shock and Carbon Autocracy in India
Elizabeth Chatterjee, Department of History, University of Chicago
One year before the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973, the global South was struck by a very different kind of energy crisis. A series of interlocking climate shocks ravaged agricultural heartlands around the planet, precipitating famines and electricity shortages just as oil prices began to spike. This early 1970s polycrisis briefly unlocked a radically new horizon of energetic possibilities that played out differently across the globe. Especially hard hit were poor oil-importing nations, still largely overlooked in the decade’s burgeoning historiography. In India, the largest of such nations, the combined climate-food-energy crisis brought a twinned set of fateful changes. By June 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship – the Emergency – for the first and only time in independent India’s existence, one amongst a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the postcolonial South. Less noticed was a second transformation with planetary ramifications. Rising popular expectations collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of coal, despie elite reservations about the environmental damage that would follow. Analyzing these dynamics is crucial to understand India’s rapidly rising carbon emissions, and offers evidence on the complex and troubling societal consequences of climate shocks.
SLCC
Date: October 24, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:15
2021
Climate Futures’ Past: Insurance, Cyclones and Weather Knowledge in the Indian Ocean World
Debjani Bhattacharyya, Department of History, Drexel University
What are the historical antecedents to the contemporary financialization of climate threats through carbon markets or greening of asset portfolios? This talk argues for a longer colonial genealogy to the contemporary climate futures market, to show how British imperial expansion in the Indian ocean and the coterminous expansion of premium-based marine insurance shapes how we define weather disturbance and climate threats. Paleo-climatologists documented a spike in severe weather and tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal from the mid 1700s, a period when British Empire vastly expanded in the Indian ocean. Analyzing 18th-century merchants’ papers, Lloyd’s records, navigational journals and insurance cases fought in the marine courts in India and the admiralty courts in London shows that tropical cyclones, instead of becoming limits to be overcome simply through scientific forecasting, were instead financialized and made profitable through a brisk and thriving trade in speculative underwriting. These records reveal that actuarial experiments were not only central for garnering profit from the turbulence of the cyclonic Bay of Bengal but also created a colonial version of a derivatives market in climate futures. Such financialization of “natural limits” simultaneously laid the groundwork for nineteenth century theories of climate disturbance. Bridging histories of finance and Anthropocene scholarship the paper documents how the modalities, concepts and frameworks for producing knowledge about climate emanated out of the very webs of speculative finance, insurance and trade that enveloped the globe during this period. I conclude by arguing that turning to the Indian Ocean helps us understand how this space faced with the exigencies of global trade became a laboratory of actuarial experiments and weather knowledge production. It also allows us to identify a longer genealogy that shows that the very structures of climate knowledge-making based on ideas of profitability and the overcoming of ecological (and currently biospheric) limits is not simply a neoliberal story but were being scripted in the colonies from the latter half of the eighteenth-century.
SLCC
Date: March 23, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
Encountering Climate in Models and Materials
Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL
In this seminar I will present the main argument of my new book, Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, which came out last month. Based on ethnographic research that looked at attempts to bring climate science to bear on the governance of cities, the talk focuses on the experience of people living and working in Manchester, UK, and their encounters with the ambivalent materiality of climate models. To understand these encounters I suggest we need to develop an understanding of climate not as a representation of an existing reality but a ‘form of thought’ whose contours are relational, but yet tangible, and whose ramifications are still being worked out. Building on the argument of this book I point to the directions that this research is taking me in now, presenting some nascent ideas about how to continue research in climate-thinking and its world-transforming possibilities.
SLCC
Date: January 26, 2021
Time: 13:00-14:30
At the Island’s Edge: Living and Learning Within Intersectional Ecologies
Amelia Moore, Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island
Centered around my experiences as a woman of color in the American academy, this talk spans eighteen years of research, exploring three projects that have shaped the way I think and work as an anthropologist of the Anthropocene. Studying interdisciplinary conservation science in The Bahamas revealed the contours of the Anthropocene Islands. Working with a coral restoration project in Indonesia made me aware of the techno-politics of witnessing. And learning to look beyond offshore wind farms in order to begin to see the island of Manisses in the state of Rhode Island brought forward collaborations and connections I hadn’t known I needed. Today, I am a small part of a network of diverse scholars who argue that we gain analytic and ethical insight from the intersections of theory, history, geography, social difference, ways of knowing, lived experiences, and forms of being. I will conclude by sharing how some of those insights have come to matter for my own situated academic practice.
SLCC
Date: February 16, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
What is Climate Resilience for All?
Lisa Schipper, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
This talk will focus on unpacking the idea of climate resilient development (CRD). While the climate is changing, many people are still living in extreme poverty and in circumstances that will make even the current amount of warming very difficult. Even if we stop emitting greenhouse gas emissions now, we still need to work hard at achieving sustainable development. However this means that we need to achieve development that is low carbon and we also need to integrate the changes in climate that we now have (ie, we need adaptation). This is the idea behind CRD – it takes into account that development still needs to happen, but emphasises that this development needs to be different to avoid making climate change worse and to build resilience to the changes that have already happened. What we know now is that there are several options that are no longer on the table due to the way that we have already changed the climate, however some pathways to climate resilience remain. However, there are two problems (1) that the window of opportunity to forge these pathways is rapidly closing and (2) the opportunities are not even for everyone around the world. The inequitable opportunities are driven by the underlying vulnerability to climate change, which creates a rift between the need to adapt to the impacts of climate change and the gap in development. Until we close the development gap and address the drivers of vulnerability, adaptation will be inadequate. I will also address these questions: Is CRD a non-concept that only offers a false sense of hope, when we know that most pathways for many people to achieve some sort of climate resilience are no longer available? Can the idea of climate resilient development become a new development paradigm? Can adaptation, plus mitigation, plus sustainable development be more than the sum of its parts?
SLCC
Date: November 30, 2021
Time: 11:00-12:30
Ceasing the Means of Reduction: Toward a New Antiracist Approach to Community Solar Campaigns
Myles Lennon, Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment and Society & Anthropology, Brown University
Environmental justice activists in the U.S. have recently launched local solar campaigns to empower communities of color as part of their broader efforts for anti-racist climate justice. But these campaigns often prioritize what I call the means of reduction over the means of production. The means of reduction refers to the graphics, spreadsheets, and calculations that apprehend a good or service as capable of reducing negative phenomena such as carbon emissions or high electricity bills. By centering the means of reduction in their community solar campaigns, EJ activists overlook the extractive, exploitative, and capital-intensive material realities of solar technology production. In the process, they undercut their antiracist, climate justice goals. In this talk, I call for a new community solar campaign approach that shifts the focus from the means of reduction to the means of production. This approach repurposes the environmental justice concept of “co-pollutants” to illuminate environmental injustices throughout solar supply chains. It then addresses these injustices by: (1) leveraging economies of scale across marginalized communities in ways that prioritize solar technologies produced under safe, fair, and sustainable working conditions; and (2) fostering solidarity between marginalized communities on both ends of the supply chain.
SLCC
Date: November 16, 2021
Time: 16:30-18:00
The (Applied) Epistemology of Resilience and Adaptation
Jesse M. Keenan, School of Architecture, Tulane University
This lecture maps out the emerging transdisciplinary field of adaptation science, including an exploration of the allied concepts of adaptation, resilience and risk mitigation. In particular, this lecture seeks to provide insight on the categorical variants of resilience and the extent to which these variants possess their own conceptual and analytical prowess. From here, resilience is understood not as a singular concept but a collection of concepts that have divergent meanings and applications that reinforce the necessity to understand subjective trade-offs that vary according to stakeholder orientation, time horizon, the distribution of associated costs and benefits, and the extent to which there may be both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. In this regard, resilience and adaptation are referenced as complex processes and not outcomes that represent absolute and universal goods. The lecture will conclude with how these diverse concepts are being applied in the United States at both the federal and state-level climate policy.
SLCC
Date: May 4, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
Taking Renewables to Market: Prospects for the After-Subsidy Energy Transition
Brett Christophers, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University
The development of renewable energy resources is currently undergoing a sea-change. With the cost of key (solar and wind) technologies having significantly declined in the past decade, governments are widely reducing or even removing the subsidies and revenue guarantees that have supported the development of renewables to date. The renewables sector is struggling to stand commercially on its own feet, however: without the collateral of state support, it is often difficult for developers to secure affordable project financing. In this talk I discuss both this growing challenge to the energy transition and a principal mechanism to which renewables developers are turning to try to resolve it – the corporate power-purchase agreement (PPA). Under renewables PPAs, corporations ranging from cloud-computing providers to aluminium smelters contract to buy electricity from solar parks or wind farms at fixed or floor prices for periods of up to 15–20 years. Often crucial in enabling developers to raise finance, PPAs have been widely hailed as re-energizing a faltering energy transition. But to rely on the purchasing habits of the likes of Amazon and Google rather than the investment priorities of governments to maintain the shift into renewables is, of course, to raise important political, economic and ecological questions.
SLCC
Date: October 26, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
2020
Unruly Landscapes of Environmental Change: Imagining a Future Himalaya
Andrea Nightingale, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
Attempts at governing ecological crises are just that: attempts. Life is far too unruly to quietly acquiesce to control and management raising uncomfortable questions about how to respond to current anxieties about anticipating the future. By starting from the unruliness and uncontrollability of life, this paper explores the continuous (re)configurations of humans and non-humans required to accomplish governing through conceptual ideas of boundary making. A focus on boundary making helps create new insights into the complex, often unpredictable political, social, cultural and ecological terrains that result in order to contribute towards a posthuman ethics of environmental governance. Drawing from scholars of science and political ecologists who have long pointed out that knowing is not somehow separate from the worlds we create, and feminist work on power and recognition, the paper looks at how boundary making reflects the operation of power across scales. It shows how environmental change programs are caught up in the riotous, inadvertent contradictions of environmental governance. Action, imagination, naming, and everyday practices create lasting connections; they bring the world into being in a continuous and dynamic manner demanding that we develop a more than human ethics. Using a case study of Nepal, the paper works through the entanglements of forests, user-groups, geopolitics and efforts at responding to predictions of calamitous change to show how they are complicit in producing the dilemmas we face.
SLCC
Date: January 27, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
The Housing/Habitat Project: Tracing Impacts of the Affordability Crisis in the Wildlands of Exurban California
Miriam Greenberg, Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
The recent increase in wildfires in California has raised awareness of the dangerous spread of housing development at the Wildlands Urban Interface [WUI], and how this interacts with extreme weather events caused by climate change. Yet in addition to fire, growing exurban housing development and the infrastructure it requires have caused a range of social and ecological impacts over recent years, including the loss and fragmentation of habitat for wildlife. In this talk I discuss a new research project bringing together scholars in urban and environmental studies to understand these dynamics and a little-understood driver of them: California’s affordable housing crisis. Using the region surrounding Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz as case study, we will first explore how unaffordability and exclusionary housing policies in core urban areas have displaced people to cheaper, sprawled developments in remote, less regulated exurbs, including in rural areas and the WUI. We will then address the social and ecological impacts of this exurban development. Alongside environmental justice implications for “extreme commuters” now living in harm’s way, this includes increasing habitat fragmentation for native species like mountain lions, which depend upon large, continuous ranges to maintain biodiversity. In short, the project looks at how crises for ‘housing and habitat’ evolved and may now be interacting with each other. In so doing, it aims to highlight the complex interactions between the “3 E’s” of equity, ecology, and economy under conditions of market-oriented urbanization; bridge often separate literatures in housing studies, urban political ecology, and conservation biology; and inform public policy and political movements aiming for housing, transportation, and multi-species justice within sustainable urban regions.
SLCC
Date: February 17, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
Damages Done: The Long-Term Impacts of Rising Disaster Costs on Wealth Inequality
James R. Elliott, Department of Sociology, Rice University
While climate science warns of long-term impacts that include the increased frequency and cost of natural disasters, social scientists rarely examine the long-term social consequences of such disasters and how we recover from them. This talk fills some of that gap. It begins by shifting disaster research from an event- to a population-centered framework. It then applies the tools of stratification research to a randomized sample of adults followed over fifteen years as natural hazards of varying types and levels of devastation hit the areas where they live. Results indicate that as local property damages from natural hazards increase, so too do inequalities in wealth accumulation over time, especially along the lines of race, education, and homeownership status. And, the more government spends on recovery aid in affected areas, the more those inequalities grow. Implications for theorizing and redressing climate injustices will be discussed.
SLCC
Date: November 10, 2020
Time: 4-5:30
Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Current Environmental Crisis
Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University
Human societies have developed very different trajectories of engagement with their environments over time. Some of these long-term relationships contain more potential for sustainability than others. Early human societies worshipped ‘nature beings’, including water serpent deities who manifested the elemental and generative powers of water. Such beliefs supported collaborative and reciprocal efforts to co-exist respectfully with the non-human world: a form of ‘conviviality’ that maintained highly sustainable lifeways. However, as many societies enlarged, became more hierarchical, and developed more instrumental technologies, they humanised their gods to worship their own rather than non-human powers. This produced ideas about ‘dominion’ over nature that, in prioritising human needs and interests at the expense of all others, have led directly to the current environmental crisis. Focusing on images and objects representing water serpent beings, and exploring what happened to these over time, this seminar draws on the cross-cultural comparison that is central to anthropology, as well as the temporal depth offered by history and archaeology, to ask what we can learn from earlier societies, and from the contemporary indigenous communities who retain traditional beliefs and values. Is there creative scope to incorporate the tenets of more sustainable modes of environmental engagement into contemporary debates about ‘rights for nature’? Can alternate worldviews assist societies in developing less anthropocentric ways of thinking about and engaging with the non-human world? In the face of contemporary realities, how can we re-establish more convivial human-environmental relations?
SLCC
Date: December 1, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
The politics of climate change, uncertainty and transformation in marginal environments
Professor Lyla Mehta, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK; Visiting Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
The scale and impacts of climate change remain deeply uncertain. This is particularly true at the local level, where climate related uncertainties combined with unequal capitalist growth trajectories often exacerbate social and political inequities and the vulnerabilities of marginalised communities. Policy makers and scientists tend to draw on quantitative assessments, models and scenario building to understand and capture uncertainty. But these are often disconnected from how local people – particularly those living at the margins – make sense of and cope with uncertainty. This paper focuses on diverse and contested framings of climate change and uncertainty in three sites in South Asia (dryland Kutch, the Sundarbans delta and coastal Mumbai). It looks at how uncertainty is understood and experienced from ‘below’ by the lived experiences of local people, how it is conceptualised and represented from ‘above’ by climate scientists and experts and how the ‘middle’ – civil society, NGOs, academics – can potentially function as brokers between the ‘below’ and ‘above’. Uncertainty can be epistemic, ontological and linked to broader political economy conditions. Often official efforts to deal with uncertainty are highly policiticised and can increase the vulnerabilities of marginalised groups. While uncertainty can lead to anxieties about the future, I conclude by exploring whether it can also provide an opportunity to create transformation and structural change in marginal environments characterised by climate related uncertainties.
SLCC
Date: June 8, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
The New U.S. Climate Battleground: Actors and Coalitions in the States
J. Timmons Roberts, Department of Sociology and Institute at Brown for Environment & Society, Brown University
Gridlock and rollback in Washington has led to a turn to the states for action on climate change in the U.S. The state of Massachusetts presents a particularly puzzling case, since it was an early leader with binding emissions targets, but the succeeding dozen years have seen most ambitious efforts stalled or watered down. We collected 1,187 pieces of legislative testimony, all reported lobbying visits, and input from over fifty experts. We describe the legislative interests, resource mobilization, and framings of the different coalitions engaged in Massachusetts energy politics. We find that clean energy advocates have few staunch allies and face a cohesive coalition of opponents from the real estate, fossil fuel and chemical, and utilities industries. Further, our analysis indicates the central role utilities play in blocking the most ambitious clean energy legislation, and how they remodel those bills that survive the process into forms favorable to their interests
SLCC
Date: October 13, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
2019
Renewing Accumulation? Political Economies and Ecologies of Renewable Energy
James McCarthy, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University
A major global shift towards renewable energy is widely seen as an essential, if insufficient, response to the challenges of climate change and transition away from fossil fuels. Interest and investments in, deployments of, and institutionalization of policies regarding renewable energy continue to soar in many countries around the world, in some cases prompting mounting rearguard actions against it from countries and corporations deeply invested in established energy geographies. Surging activity around renewable energy raises a host of questions central to political economy and political ecology: Can renewable energy provide a viable basis for the continued expansion of the capitalist economy, and if so, how and at what, and whose, expense? How will growing demands for land for abiotic renewable energy production fit into the contemporary land rush, and into deeper histories of the relationships between land, territory, and accumulation under capitalism? Does a major transition to renewable energy have the potential to alter dominant dynamics of the capitalist economy, or is it more likely to reinscribe them while extending the domain of commodification? This talk will explore these questions through analysis of recent examples of renewable energy initiatives from around the world, drawing from both current literature and original research on the World Bank’s Renewable Energy Resource Mapping Initiative and cases in the contemporary United States.
SLCC
Date: March 18, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Crooked Cats: Human-Big Cat Entanglements in the Anthropocene
Nayanika Mathur, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford
This talk is drawn from longstanding ethnographic research in a region of the Indian Himalaya where tigers and leopards live in close proximity to humans. A core problematic in such multispecies space-sharing is a lack of reliable comprehensive human knowledge of big cats. This ever-present uncertainty holds particularly true for those big cats that are considered “crooked” due to their proclivity for eating humans. Popularly known as “man-eaters”, they remain un-knowable and highly unpredictable in spite of their long history and study by a variety of disciplines ranging from the behavioral sciences and zoology to wildlife conservationism. Against this backdrop of merely speculative knowledge of man-eaters, human co-habitation with them creates a terrifyingly distinct lived atmosphere; one in which there is an effervescence of stories, conspiracy theories, jokes, news items, rumors, critical discourse, rage, and the making of celebrity big cats. I begin by elaborating on these social effects of life and living with man-eaters in South Asia. I then move on to study the discourse of climate change, which is slowly emerging as the hegemonic narrative that not just explains crooked cats but also displaces alternative ways of making sense of these beasts. My core objective in this talk is to ask how might we put these distinct-but-related forms of knowing the nonhuman animal within the same frame of comprehensibility? To do so I draw upon the Anthropocene as a method and probe the extent to which it allows us to work through the quandary of knowing, living, and dealing with potentially predatory big cats in the era of climate change.
SLCC
Date: May 13, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
From Planetary Improvement to Energy Abolition: Against and beyond the Transparent Energy of Whiteness
Jesse Goldstein, Department of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University
In this presentation I examine the role that clean technologies, in particular those associated with renewable energy generation, play within mainstream environmentalism, and specifically calls for a Green New Deal. With a focus on strategies that I term planetary improvement, the unfolding climate crisis is often framed as first and foremost an energy crisis, to be solved by the rapid deployment of renewable energy systems that will help “save the planet” without fundamentally altering prevailing patterns of sociotechnical life and material culture.
Without questioning the dire need to promote and realize a significant energy transition, I ask whether these approaches to environmentalism are limited by a colonial and extractive logic and therefore do not go far enough. To what extent do they presuppose a very historically specific form of energy generation, circulation and use, with all possible solutions then framed accordingly? I ask whether the environmentalism articulated therein displays a commitment to the transparent energy of whiteness: universal, place-less, abstract, ever-flowing and unquestionably desirable.
What might it look like to operate instead upon a conceptual terrain that frames environmental struggles for climate justice, just transitions, energy democracy, etc., as a politics of energy abolition? This is not to propose an anti-technological politics that is categorically against all energy or the modern affordances that it enables, but a politics that seriously interrogates the transparent whiteness of energy, that decenters the fetish of technological fixes and opens up the possibility of expanding our conceptions of energy, abundance and the range of possible and viable strategies for building vibrant futures.
SLCC
Date: February 4, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Rentiers of the Green Economy? Placing Rent in Clean Energy Transition
Sarah Knuth, Department of Geography, Durham University
Across multiple spheres and spaces today, geographers have argued that contemporary capitalism has become essentially/different/, “increasingly dominated by forms of rentiership rather than entrepreneurship”. Such arguments about the omnipresence of “value-grabbing” and the nature (and tenuous future) of surplus value production in a late capitalist moment, while in need of ongoing critical appraisal, nevertheless suggest a vital lens into a key accumulation frontier now unfolding worldwide: the Anthropocene challenge of clean energy transition, and an unfolding array of strategies to make such a transition pay. In this paper, I consider a distinct set of practices, geographic entanglements, and political questions emerging within such new exploitations of the ‘green economy’. I suggest that this process entails multiple and overlapping forms of rent and rentierism. As ‘green’ entrepreneurs and (neo)rentiers simultaneously expand capitalist frontiers extensively in space and intensively into new /kinds/of spaces, realms, and materials, they are forging new forms of monopoly control over and extractive claims upon land/real property, money, and intellectual property. Such claims and their contestations are critical in ongoing struggles to reimagine a green economy that benefits the many
SLCC
Date: March 4, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Follow the Carbon: Housing Movements and Carbon Emissions in the 21st Century City
Daniel Aldana Cohen, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
In Follow the Carbon, I will make an empirical argument that ordinary people’s struggles to improve their quality of life can be a force for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, and a theoretical argument that a “collective consumption” perspective (borrowing from Manuel Castells) helps to clarify how this is so. I will draw on fieldwork conducted in São Paulo and New York on low-carbon policy and housing politics, which in New York is culminating in pioneering low-carbon legislation informally called “A Green Dew Deal for New York.” And I will sketch results on the emergence of state-wide “just transition” campaign waged from below in New York State. I will also present early carbon footprint data produced by my collaborator Kevin Ummel, a data scientist and environmental economist; and I will show early results of our new big data project on whole community climate-mapping, which will look at the intersections of inequalities, the built environment, and climate at the neighborhood level across the US. I will argue that private consumption of goods and services, far from exhausting a climate politics of consumption, should be theorized as part of a broader, collective struggle over the social organization of consumption in its broadest sense.
SLCC
Date: November 11, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
What is a Resource Curse?: Energy, Infrastructure, Colonialism, and Climate Change in Native North America
Andrew Curley, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
SLCC
Date: December 2, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Book Launch: Spaceship in the Desert
Gökçe Günel, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City’s renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar’s initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.
SLCC
Date: October 21, 2019
Time: 18:00-19:30
A Prayer for the World: Climate Change, Engaged Scholarship, and Writing the Future
Paige West, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University
Each new day, it seems, we wake to a barrage of terrible global news and horrifying images. This is particularly true with regard to climate news. It is enough to paralyze even the most empathetic and concerned citizens. In this lecture, drawing on her twenty three years of research in Papua New Guinea, anthropologist Paige West asks us to consider what each of us can do as students, scholars, writers, and thinkers to understand the historical processes that set the conditions of possibility for our present world, to document or to witness the transformations of the present, and to use our scholars skills to work towards transforming the future.
SLCC
Date: November 4, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
2018
Building Green: Forging Environmental Futures in Mumbai
Anne Rademacher, Program in Environmental Studies and Department of Anthropology, New York University
What does it mean to learn, and try to practice, green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, this talk explores how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices, and then sought to implement them in Mumbai.
SLCC
Date: May 2, 2018
Time: 16:30-18:00
The Fight for Retreat: Urban Unbuilding in the Era of Climate Change
Liz Koslov, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
Much research reveals the devastating and unequal impacts of forced relocation and displacement in contexts ranging from disasters to urban regeneration. However, the effects of climate change are rendering many places increasingly vulnerable – even uninhabitable – as seas rise, storms intensify, and all manner of weather becomes more extreme. This talk examines the growing calls to adapt to these changes through “managed retreat” or realignment, by unbuilding and moving away from the most at-risk areas. It draws on fieldwork in New York City after Hurricane Sandy, when residents along one hard-hit stretch of shore organized in favor of returning their waterfront neighborhoods to “Mother Nature” and relocating to higher ground. What are the consequences of this form of collective movement away from rising waters? Can community-driven retreat offer a more equitable alternative to other forms of urban adaptation? Or will unbuilding in the face of climate change serve to deepen and entrench social divides?
SLCC
Date: June 4, 2018
Time: 16:30-18:00
Demand: Exploring the Dynamics of Energy, Mobility, and Demand
Elizabeth Shove, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
This presentation takes stock of some of the ideas and arguments developed in the DEMAND Centre (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand) over the last five years. Research in the DEMAND centre was informed by the core idea that people do not use energy for its own sake but as part of accomplishing social practices at home, at work and in moving around. In this talk I reflect on the experience of developing and promoting such an agenda, and on some of the challenges involved.
SLCC
Date: November 12, 2018
Time: 13:00-14:30
Divided Legacies of the Landsat Satellite: The Origins of a Climate Science Tool in American Mineral Exploits, 1965-1980
Megan Black, Department of International History, LSE
This paper will examine the origins of the Landsat satellite, an earth resource satellite known today for tracking patterns related to climate change, in U.S. mineral pursuits of the late Cold War. In the mid-1960s and during the height of the Space Race, U.S. officials began imagining satellites that could illuminate previously untapped minerals around the world. Landsat was the result. Beginning in the 1970s, it helped some of the world’s largest multinational companies extract oil and other minerals in ways that undercut ongoing conservationist efforts in Third World nations in particular. Throughout, however, the satellites’ promoters consistently touted its environmental benefits. What were some of the impacts of the interwoven desires to use a satellite to simultaneously promote American and private interests in extraction and protect the environment on a planetary scale?
SLCC
Date: December 3, 2018
Time: 13:00-14:30
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
Malini Ranganathan, School of International Service, American University
What do abolitionist sensibilities mean for climate justice? “Resilience” is proposed by experts as a solution for vulnerability to climate change in cities. But this prescription places the burden of “bouncing back” at local scales, subtly validating the processes of racial capitalism that endanger residents in the first place. This research focuses on areas vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for resilience enhancements in Washington, DC. After critically reviewing central debates surrounding resilience thinking and applications in DC and drawing from critical race and feminist theories, we argue for an explicitly anti-racist conceptualization of climate justice. This research uses a neighborhood-level survey, archival analysis, oral histories, and interviews to argue that abolitionist climate justice entails the appreciation of historical racism and its afterlives; an understanding of the intersectional drivers of precarity; and the centering of everyday solidarities and the ethics of care of those deemed most at risk to climate change, even if these do not articulate within a liberal environmentalist framework.
SLCC
Date: October 8, 2018
Time: 13:00-14:30
Feminist Perspectives of Climate Change: Social Reproduction and Survival in the Great Caribbean
Diana Ojeda, Departments of Geography and International Studies and Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington
Catastrophic narratives of the end of the world populate climate change knowledge and policy. Seeking to disrupt these narratives’ enticement of fear and violence, this lecture focuses on the places where the world has ended many times. In the face of US military interventions and ongoing environmental crises, I draw from feminist studies to explore the overlapping geographies of dispossession and accumulation, extraction and exploitation, and tourism and militarization that have historically shaped the Great Caribbean, situating it in the frontlines of climate change. From a perspective informed by social reproduction, I further delve into the lived experiences of climate change in the region and the everyday forms of resistance to it.
SLCC
Date: May 18, 2026
Location: Online
Time: 15:00-16:30
The Politics of Land and Infrastructure in the Making of Indonesia’s “Geothermal Island”
Emily Yeh, Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder
With 40% of the world’s known geothermal reserves and second in installed capacity, Indonesia plans to become a “geothermal superpower.” Geothermal is particularly important as a baseload power source as the country struggles to meet its decarbonization goals. In this context, Flores island was designated a “Geothermal Island” in 2017, but development of geothermal has been very slow due to resistance from indigenous communities. This resistance has been largely dismissed and misunderstood by policymakers, development personnel, and government staff, who paint Flores residents as uneducated or manipulated by outside interests. In this presentation I will discuss four case studies in Flores where geothermal development is either planned or implemented. In doing so I will highlight the politics of indigenous ontologies of land, infrastructure, and articulations of indigeneity in their struggles.
SLCC
Date: May 27, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 16:00-17:30
Towards a Buoyant Political Ecology: Rethinking Marginalization for Coastal Climate Change Adaptation in the Tropics
Haripriya Rangan, Australia India Institute and School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne
Judith Carney, Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles
Judith Carney, Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles
The land-water dichotomy plays a key role in the prevailing global climate change adaptation (CCA) policy discourse for tropical coastal areas. This dichotomy is implicitly informed by a land-centred conception of property which regards areas that fluctuate between water and land, or ‘aquaterras’, as marginal and in need of development to make them economically profitable. By adopting this perspective, mainstream CCA policies ignore the diverse, vernacular systems of adaptation that communities that dwell in such tropical coastal aquaterras have developed through multigenerational and lived experiences to negotiate climatic and contingent uncertainties. We call on political ecologists to jettison land-centred, economic representations of marginality and marginalisation in favour of a ‘buoyant’, critical CCA approach which recognizes and builds on the vernacular expertise of tropical coastal aquaterra communities.
SLCC
Date: June 9, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
The Market that Cannot Know Itself: Missing the Forest for the Trees in Carbon Crediting Schemes
Javier Lezaun, Associate Professor, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford
Independent studies show that a majority of projects dedicated to the production of carbon credits in Mexico are victims of criminal extortion, or suffer materially from pervasive insecurity. Yet this predicament is rarely mentioned in the regular reports that monitor the progress of these projects, and the issue of violence is studiously avoided in public discussions about carbon markets in Mexico. This is striking, given the penchant of these markets for “transparency” and “auditability,” and their commitment to provide “social safeguards” to the communities that participate in the production of credits. Drawing on Claudio Lomnitz’s thesis of the contemporary Mexican state as “estranged” from itself, this paper explores the mechanisms that allow a market so invested in making territories and communities legible to “take its distance” from the conditions of chronic insecurity that shape its functioning.
SLCC
Date: March 24, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
Atlantic Transitions: Freedom and Justice from Abolition to Climate Change
Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor, Department of International History, LSE with Austin Zeiderman, Professor of Geography, Department of Geography and Environment, LSE
This event brings together Jake Subryan Richards and Austin Zeiderman in a conversation exploring freedom and justice across Atlantic worlds from abolition to the climate crisis. Drawing on two recently published books, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River (Duke, 2025) and The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale, 2025), the discussion examines the transition from enslavement to liberation as an uneven, contested, and unfinished process that remains entangled with the political and economic order responsible for contemporary planetary predicaments. Grounded in historical and ethnographic perspectives, the event asks how abolition can illuminate contemporary debates about energy, climate, and just transitions.
SLCC
Date: March 3, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
Climate Methodologies: A Dialogue on the Social Life of Environmental Knowledge
Harriet Bulkeley, Professor, Department of Geography, Durham University
Climate change is radically reconfiguring not only the world we live in, but also the methods we use to understand it. How do we adapt our methodological toolkit in the environmental social sciences and humanities in response to the climate urgencies and emergencies that surround us? How are the human and environmental sciences at large shifting their modes of enquiry? What new forms of climate knowledge are emerging and with what effects?
In this dialogue, we take up these questions in dialogue with Prof Harriet Bulkeley, a leading thinker in the politics of climate change, who will discuss her own responses to the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by the changing climate along with SLCC organisers. This forms part of an ongoing series of conversations about how climate change unsettles established modes of inquiry and demands new ways of rethinking our disciplinary approaches to knowing the social world and its relationship with the environment. The discussion will be of interest to those researching the social life of climate change as well as those concerned with the contested politics of climate knowledge.
SLCC
Date: February 9, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 16:00-17:30
Research is a Land Relation
Max Liboiron, Professor in Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland
All research has a relationship to land. It can uphold colonialism, or it can resist it. Even well-intentioned projects in environmental science and activism often assume automatic rights to study or manage Indigenous land. That assumption comes from an inherited colonial worldview. Given this inheritance, the question then becomes: how do we enact better land relations through science, through research?
In this talk, Prof Max Liboiron will draw from their book Pollution is Colonialism while sharing new lessons and insights developed since its 2021 publication. These include the evolution of “community peer review” into fuller practices of community co-analysis, along with other emerging methods that reshape how research is designed, analyzed, and even written (footnotes and puns will make an appearance). Anticolonial science is not only possible – it is already happening.
In this talk, Prof Max Liboiron will draw from their book Pollution is Colonialism while sharing new lessons and insights developed since its 2021 publication. These include the evolution of “community peer review” into fuller practices of community co-analysis, along with other emerging methods that reshape how research is designed, analyzed, and even written (footnotes and puns will make an appearance). Anticolonial science is not only possible – it is already happening.
SLCC
Date: February 3, 2026
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
Forests are Black Futures
Danielle Purifoy, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Forests possess mythical significance in various global cultural traditions—as mysterious spiritual ecologies and spaces of healing, transition, and regeneration through human and more than human life cycles. They also pose a core problem for modernity. Can Western ideas of social and economic progress, speed, and growth coexist within forest time?
This is a question for which Afro-descendant peoples in the “New World” were forced to provide an answer—through the clearance of forests and other native ecosystems to construct the plantation. But the shapes of their livingness, and spatial imaginaries of freedoms were (and are) bound up with their abilities to reclaim forest time as against ever encroaching plantation time across generations. With the U.S. South (the country’s “wood basket”) experiencing an expansion of concentrated forestland ownership and local place divestment—most recently through the emergence of the wood biomass industry as a UK/EU climate solution—I argue that a social-relational view of the forest from the perspectives of Black communities now experiencing forest loss and place destruction via the carbon market offers an important critique of modern methods to shape forest futures.
SLCC
Date: October 14, 2025
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 16:30-18:00
Inheritance, Ghosts, and the Future: Sociological and Life Writing amid the Climate Crisis
Alice Mah, Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies, University of Glasgow
In this talk, Professor Mah will discuss her book, Red Pockets: An Offering, which blends memoir, environmental storytelling, and reflections on migration, memory, and intergenerational legacies.
Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors. They make offerings of food and incense to prevent their ancestors from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune, illnesses and crop failures. Yet for the past century, the tombs of many have been left unattended because of the ruptures of war and revolution. Ninety years after her grandfather’s last visit and fifty years after her last relative died in the village, Alice Mah returns to her ancestral home in South China. While she finds clan members who still remember her family, there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.
Mah chronicles her search for an offering to the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, which takes her from the rice villages of South China to post-industrial England, to the Chinatowns of British Columbia where she grew up and the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves, which culminates in a crisis of spiritual belief: what do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?
SLCC
Date: December 2, 2025
Location: OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-18:30
The Point is to Change It: A Conversation Between Environmental Activist-Scholars
Laura Pulido, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics
Marco Armiero, Institute for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Marco Armiero, Institute for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona
This event will take the form of a conversation between Prof. Laura Pulido and Prof. Marco Armiero on their research and personal trajectories. Both have envisioned and lived their academic work in a dialectical relationship with political and social engagement.
Pulido has sought to challenge white supremacy by researching political ecology, social movements among people of color, and cultural memory. Armiero has looked at environmental issues—be they dam disasters, toxicity, or fascist ecologies—as if power matters, striving to politicize environmental humanities while employing storytelling as a revolutionary device. Both have embraced an explicit commitment to side with marginalized communities, approaching their academic work as part of a broader struggle for social and environmental justice.
In this conversation, they will reflect on their paths, intertwining personal choices with the wider development of the two interdisciplinary fields they have actively shaped. Faithful to the feminist principle that the personal is political, our guests will share their experiences while addressing the challenges of being activist-scholars. The session will conclude with an open exchange, welcoming questions from participants in a spirit of mutual support.
SLCC
Date: November 11, 2025
Location: PAR LG.03
Time: 17:00-18:30
Climate Methodologies: A Dialogue on the Social Life of Environmental Knowledge
Sarah Besky, Cornell University
Shaila Seshia Galvin, Geneva Graduate Institute
Shaila Seshia Galvin, Geneva Graduate Institute
Climate change is radically reconfiguring not only the world we live in, but also the methods we use to understand it. How do we adapt our methodological toolkit in the environmental social sciences and humanities in response to the climate urgencies and emergencies that surround us? How are the human and environmental sciences at large shifting their modes of enquiry? What new forms of climate knowledge are emerging and with what effects?
In this dialogue, two leading ethnographers of social and environmental change discuss their responses to the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by the changing climate. This forms part of an ongoing series of conversations about how climate change unsettles established modes of inquiry and demands new ways of rethinking our disciplinary approaches to knowing the social world and its relationship with the environment. The discussion will be of interest to those researching the social life of climate change as well as those concerned with the contested politics of climate knowledge.
SLCC
Date: June 10, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 5.25
Time: 11:00-12:30
Ecologies of Difference: A Discussion of Austin Zeiderman’s Artery
Austin Zeiderman, Majed Akhter, Gisa Weszkalnys, Jake Subryan Richards, Kasia Paprocki
The Magdalena River, linking Colombia’s Andean interior and Caribbean coast, has long served as a conduit for the expansion of colonialism and capitalism in the Americas. Now a state-backed megaproject seeks to transform the waterway into a logistics corridor.
Austin Zeiderman’s new book, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River, relates the river’s fraught past and uncertain future to global entanglements of race, nature, and capital. Zeiderman examines how racial orders shape ecologies and infrastructures, thereby upholding exploitative relations not only among human populations, but also between people and the planet.
Join us for a discussion of Zeiderman’s book in which panelists will reflect on the regimes of extractivism and inequality that continue to afflict the modern world.
SLCC
Date: May 14, 2025
Location: LSE, MAR 1.08
Time: 18:00-19:30
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Tao Leigh Goffe, Hunter College, City University of New York
Using the Caribbean as a case study, Tao Leigh Goffe traces the vibrant and complex history of the islands back to 1492 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus when the Caribbean became the subject of Western exploitation. Dark Laboratory takes hopeful and galvanising teachings from the islands communities to offer illuminating solutions to the ecological crisis. From guano to sugarcane, coral bleaching to invasive mongoose populations, Dark Laboratory is a lyrical, vibrant and urgent investigation into the greatest threat facing humanity.
SLCC
Date: March 4, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 3.24
Time: 17:00-19:00
The Ocean at the End of History
Jessica Lehman, Department of Geography, Durham University
This seminar explores multi-disciplinary ways of understanding the ocean as a recorder of history – as a space where planetary natural history and differentiated human history intersect and comingle. Thinking across a range of sites of marine knowledge production and environmental politics, I ask, what is at stake in different ways of reading and writing history through and with the ocean? This is a question with direct relevance to contemporary climate politics, as the ocean’s capacity to draw down historical emissions and store carbon on long timescales is increasingly touted as both at risk and as a climate solution. But the ocean’s role in navigating contemporary climate change is not separate from violent and barely-submerged histories of capitalism and imperialism. In these turbulent waters, time troubles notions of progress, salvation, and solution. Ultimately, the ocean’s temporal challenges in and to the age of climate change might call on us to rethink conventional understandings of history and even time itself.
SLCC
Date: March 13, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 3.24
Time: 15:00-16:30
Unjust Energy Transition: Vignettes from the COPs, Climate Finance, and a Coal Hotspot
Nikita Sud, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
As we move from fossil fuels towards renewables, the promise of just transition is to leave no one behind. This paper aims to interrogate ideas of justice underpinning just transition. Then it explores unfolding just transition measures in the climate vulnerable Global South. To pursue the first objective, a historical and political approach is adopted. I demonstrate the contested nature of environmental and climate justice claims that preceded the just transition agenda. Typically led by communities dependent on land, water, and the environmental commons for livelihoods and life, place-based struggles pushed against dispossession by developmental, modernist states and capital. From the 1990s, with the growing imprint of the climate crisis, states and businesses have increasingly entered the climate solutions arena. At multilateral climate fora like the UN COPs, states, along with businesses, finance, and technology firms, hold the mantle of just transition today. In this upscaled context, justice concerns play out around the distribution of climate finance, especially from the traditionally polluting Global North to the South.
Pursuant of the second objective of the research, and drawing on ethnographic and interview-based data, the paper traces the single largest climate finance partnership between North and South: Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership. In the shaping of Indonesia’s JETP, justice has become a tagline. The focus is on energy as investment opportunity—for the scheme’s international funders, and the recipient country. The trajectory of justice from ground-up, environmental and climate justice struggles, to multilateral climate fora, and high-profile North-South just transition programmes—shows elitisation and depoliticization. It is no surprise that a South-based Just Energy Transition Partnership is far from taking everybody along.
SLCC
Date: January 30, 2025
Location: LSE, OLD 3.24
Time: 15:00–16:30
Planetary Mould: More than Human Thermofixes for 1.5 Degrees
Jamie Cross, School of Social and Political Sciences and Glasgow Changing Futures, University of Glasgow
Moulds are environmentally ubiquitous and thermally tolerant, capable of adapting to rising global temperatures as well as the chemicals designed to eradicate them.
Whilst mushrooms and yeasts have received considerable attention from a multi-species and microbial turn across the social sciences and humanities, there has been little if any interest in that other, abject member of the fungi kingdom, moulds. Yet mould species are hotspots for interventions in planetary health, attracting enormous attention as emerging hazards and potential technofixes for human life at 1.5 degrees.
Around the world, from the walls of buildings to the walls of human lungs, and from fields to food storage facilities, pathogenic moulds are giving rise to new forms of public health surveillance and chemical controls. At the same time, experiments in biological and food laboratories see species of mould being reengineered as potential technological solutions to greenhouse gas emissions from meat and electronic waste.
This paper outlines a new field guide for the study of late capitalist temperatures, arguing that human relationships to mould are critical for understanding economies and societies in a warming world.
SLCC
Date: November 21, 2024
Time: 1500–1630
Archival Encounters: Writing on Black Ecological Memory
Tianna Bruno, Department of Geography, University of California Berkeley
The traditional archival record has long been critiqued for the absence of depictions of Black life. Moreover, notions of Black livingness in sites of climate and environmental injustice, often known as “sacrifice zones” are often limited. Port Arthur, Texas is in many ways a “classic” example of one
of these sites as this predominantly Black community is nestled within one of the world’s largest oil refining networks. It is also often in a state of recovery from intense hurricane events as it sits along the U.S. Gulf Coast. In this talk, I intervene in the normative archival record of Port Arthur through creative archival methods. I collaborate with community partners to co-develop this archival intervention that aims to foreground Black life and relationships to place and environment over time in Port Arthur. These methods include building a community-based oral history database, creating and installing a historical marker, and integrating environmental records.
SLCC
Date: October 10, 2024
Time: 15:00-16:30
The Fight for Retreat: Urban Unbuilding in the Era of Climate Change
Liz Koslov, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
Much research reveals the devastating and unequal impacts of forced relocation and displacement in contexts ranging from disasters to urban regeneration. However, the effects of climate change are rendering many places increasingly vulnerable – even uninhabitable – as seas rise, storms intensify, and all manner of weather becomes more extreme. This talk examines the growing calls to adapt to these changes through “managed retreat” or realignment, by unbuilding and moving away from the most at-risk areas. It draws on fieldwork in New York City after Hurricane Sandy, when residents along one hard-hit stretch of shore organized in favor of returning their waterfront neighborhoods to “Mother Nature” and relocating to higher ground. What are the consequences of this form of collective movement away from rising waters? Can community-driven retreat offer a more equitable alternative to other forms of urban adaptation? Or will unbuilding in the face of climate change serve to deepen and entrench social divides?
SLCC
Date: June 4, 2018
Time: 16:30-18:00
Building Green: Forging Environmental Futures in Mumbai
Anne Rademacher, Program in Environmental Studies and Department of Anthropology, New York University
What does it mean to learn, and try to practice, green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, this talk explores how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices, and then sought to implement them in Mumbai.
SLCC
Date: May 2, 2018
Time: 16:30-18:00
Divided Legacies of the Landsat Satellite: The Origins of a Climate Science Tool in American Mineral Exploits, 1965-1980
Megan Black, Department of International History, LSE
This paper will examine the origins of the Landsat satellite, an earth resource satellite known today for tracking patterns related to climate change, in U.S. mineral pursuits of the late Cold War. In the mid-1960s and during the height of the Space Race, U.S. officials began imagining satellites that could illuminate previously untapped minerals around the world. Landsat was the result. Beginning in the 1970s, it helped some of the world’s largest multinational companies extract oil and other minerals in ways that undercut ongoing conservationist efforts in Third World nations in particular. Throughout, however, the satellites’ promoters consistently touted its environmental benefits. What were some of the impacts of the interwoven desires to use a satellite to simultaneously promote American and private interests in extraction and protect the environment on a planetary scale?
SLCC
Date: December 3, 2018
Time: 13:00-14:30
Demand: Exploring the Dynamics of Energy, Mobility, and Demand
Elizabeth Shove, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
This presentation takes stock of some of the ideas and arguments developed in the DEMAND Centre (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand) over the last five years. Research in the DEMAND centre was informed by the core idea that people do not use energy for its own sake but as part of accomplishing social practices at home, at work and in moving around. In this talk I reflect on the experience of developing and promoting such an agenda, and on some of the challenges involved.
SLCC
Date: November 12, 2018
Time: 13:00-14:30
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
Malini Ranganathan, School of International Service, American University
What do abolitionist sensibilities mean for climate justice? “Resilience” is proposed by experts as a solution for vulnerability to climate change in cities. But this prescription places the burden of “bouncing back” at local scales, subtly validating the processes of racial capitalism that endanger residents in the first place. This research focuses on areas vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for resilience enhancements in Washington, DC. After critically reviewing central debates surrounding resilience thinking and applications in DC and drawing from critical race and feminist theories, we argue for an explicitly anti-racist conceptualization of climate justice. This research uses a neighborhood-level survey, archival analysis, oral histories, and interviews to argue that abolitionist climate justice entails the appreciation of historical racism and its afterlives; an understanding of the intersectional drivers of precarity; and the centering of everyday solidarities and the ethics of care of those deemed most at risk to climate change, even if these do not articulate within a liberal environmentalist framework.
SLCC
Date: October 8, 2018
Time: 13:00-14:30
Renewing Accumulation? Political Economies and Ecologies of Renewable Energy
James McCarthy, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University
A major global shift towards renewable energy is widely seen as an essential, if insufficient, response to the challenges of climate change and transition away from fossil fuels. Interest and investments in, deployments of, and institutionalization of policies regarding renewable energy continue to soar in many countries around the world, in some cases prompting mounting rearguard actions against it from countries and corporations deeply invested in established energy geographies. Surging activity around renewable energy raises a host of questions central to political economy and political ecology: Can renewable energy provide a viable basis for the continued expansion of the capitalist economy, and if so, how and at what, and whose, expense? How will growing demands for land for abiotic renewable energy production fit into the contemporary land rush, and into deeper histories of the relationships between land, territory, and accumulation under capitalism? Does a major transition to renewable energy have the potential to alter dominant dynamics of the capitalist economy, or is it more likely to reinscribe them while extending the domain of commodification? This talk will explore these questions through analysis of recent examples of renewable energy initiatives from around the world, drawing from both current literature and original research on the World Bank’s Renewable Energy Resource Mapping Initiative and cases in the contemporary United States.
SLCC
Date: March 18, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Rentiers of the Green Economy? Placing Rent in Clean Energy Transition
Sarah Knuth, Department of Geography, Durham University
Across multiple spheres and spaces today, geographers have argued that contemporary capitalism has become essentially/different/, “increasingly dominated by forms of rentiership rather than entrepreneurship”. Such arguments about the omnipresence of “value-grabbing” and the nature (and tenuous future) of surplus value production in a late capitalist moment, while in need of ongoing critical appraisal, nevertheless suggest a vital lens into a key accumulation frontier now unfolding worldwide: the Anthropocene challenge of clean energy transition, and an unfolding array of strategies to make such a transition pay. In this paper, I consider a distinct set of practices, geographic entanglements, and political questions emerging within such new exploitations of the ‘green economy’. I suggest that this process entails multiple and overlapping forms of rent and rentierism. As ‘green’ entrepreneurs and (neo)rentiers simultaneously expand capitalist frontiers extensively in space and intensively into new /kinds/of spaces, realms, and materials, they are forging new forms of monopoly control over and extractive claims upon land/real property, money, and intellectual property. Such claims and their contestations are critical in ongoing struggles to reimagine a green economy that benefits the many
SLCC
Date: March 4, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
From Planetary Improvement to Energy Abolition: Against and beyond the Transparent Energy of Whiteness
Jesse Goldstein, Department of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University
In this presentation I examine the role that clean technologies, in particular those associated with renewable energy generation, play within mainstream environmentalism, and specifically calls for a Green New Deal. With a focus on strategies that I term planetary improvement, the unfolding climate crisis is often framed as first and foremost an energy crisis, to be solved by the rapid deployment of renewable energy systems that will help “save the planet” without fundamentally altering prevailing patterns of sociotechnical life and material culture.
Without questioning the dire need to promote and realize a significant energy transition, I ask whether these approaches to environmentalism are limited by a colonial and extractive logic and therefore do not go far enough. To what extent do they presuppose a very historically specific form of energy generation, circulation and use, with all possible solutions then framed accordingly? I ask whether the environmentalism articulated therein displays a commitment to the transparent energy of whiteness: universal, place-less, abstract, ever-flowing and unquestionably desirable.
What might it look like to operate instead upon a conceptual terrain that frames environmental struggles for climate justice, just transitions, energy democracy, etc., as a politics of energy abolition? This is not to propose an anti-technological politics that is categorically against all energy or the modern affordances that it enables, but a politics that seriously interrogates the transparent whiteness of energy, that decenters the fetish of technological fixes and opens up the possibility of expanding our conceptions of energy, abundance and the range of possible and viable strategies for building vibrant futures.
SLCC
Date: February 4, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Crooked Cats: Human-Big Cat Entanglements in the Anthropocene
Nayanika Mathur, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford
This talk is drawn from longstanding ethnographic research in a region of the Indian Himalaya where tigers and leopards live in close proximity to humans. A core problematic in such multispecies space-sharing is a lack of reliable comprehensive human knowledge of big cats. This ever-present uncertainty holds particularly true for those big cats that are considered “crooked” due to their proclivity for eating humans. Popularly known as “man-eaters”, they remain un-knowable and highly unpredictable in spite of their long history and study by a variety of disciplines ranging from the behavioral sciences and zoology to wildlife conservationism. Against this backdrop of merely speculative knowledge of man-eaters, human co-habitation with them creates a terrifyingly distinct lived atmosphere; one in which there is an effervescence of stories, conspiracy theories, jokes, news items, rumors, critical discourse, rage, and the making of celebrity big cats. I begin by elaborating on these social effects of life and living with man-eaters in South Asia. I then move on to study the discourse of climate change, which is slowly emerging as the hegemonic narrative that not just explains crooked cats but also displaces alternative ways of making sense of these beasts. My core objective in this talk is to ask how might we put these distinct-but-related forms of knowing the nonhuman animal within the same frame of comprehensibility? To do so I draw upon the Anthropocene as a method and probe the extent to which it allows us to work through the quandary of knowing, living, and dealing with potentially predatory big cats in the era of climate change.
SLCC
Date: May 13, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
What is a Resource Curse?: Energy, Infrastructure, Colonialism, and Climate Change in Native North America
Andrew Curley, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
SLCC
Date: December 2, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Follow the Carbon: Housing Movements and Carbon Emissions in the 21st Century City
Daniel Aldana Cohen, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
In Follow the Carbon, I will make an empirical argument that ordinary people’s struggles to improve their quality of life can be a force for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, and a theoretical argument that a “collective consumption” perspective (borrowing from Manuel Castells) helps to clarify how this is so. I will draw on fieldwork conducted in São Paulo and New York on low-carbon policy and housing politics, which in New York is culminating in pioneering low-carbon legislation informally called “A Green Dew Deal for New York.” And I will sketch results on the emergence of state-wide “just transition” campaign waged from below in New York State. I will also present early carbon footprint data produced by my collaborator Kevin Ummel, a data scientist and environmental economist; and I will show early results of our new big data project on whole community climate-mapping, which will look at the intersections of inequalities, the built environment, and climate at the neighborhood level across the US. I will argue that private consumption of goods and services, far from exhausting a climate politics of consumption, should be theorized as part of a broader, collective struggle over the social organization of consumption in its broadest sense.
SLCC
Date: November 11, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
A Prayer for the World: Climate Change, Engaged Scholarship, and Writing the Future
Paige West, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University
Each new day, it seems, we wake to a barrage of terrible global news and horrifying images. This is particularly true with regard to climate news. It is enough to paralyze even the most empathetic and concerned citizens. In this lecture, drawing on her twenty three years of research in Papua New Guinea, anthropologist Paige West asks us to consider what each of us can do as students, scholars, writers, and thinkers to understand the historical processes that set the conditions of possibility for our present world, to document or to witness the transformations of the present, and to use our scholars skills to work towards transforming the future.
SLCC
Date: November 4, 2019
Time: 13:00-14:30
Book Launch: Spaceship in the Desert
Gökçe Günel, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City’s renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar’s initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.
SLCC
Date: October 21, 2019
Time: 18:00-19:30
The Housing/Habitat Project: Tracing Impacts of the Affordability Crisis in the Wildlands of Exurban California
Miriam Greenberg, Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
The recent increase in wildfires in California has raised awareness of the dangerous spread of housing development at the Wildlands Urban Interface [WUI], and how this interacts with extreme weather events caused by climate change. Yet in addition to fire, growing exurban housing development and the infrastructure it requires have caused a range of social and ecological impacts over recent years, including the loss and fragmentation of habitat for wildlife. In this talk I discuss a new research project bringing together scholars in urban and environmental studies to understand these dynamics and a little-understood driver of them: California’s affordable housing crisis. Using the region surrounding Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz as case study, we will first explore how unaffordability and exclusionary housing policies in core urban areas have displaced people to cheaper, sprawled developments in remote, less regulated exurbs, including in rural areas and the WUI. We will then address the social and ecological impacts of this exurban development. Alongside environmental justice implications for “extreme commuters” now living in harm’s way, this includes increasing habitat fragmentation for native species like mountain lions, which depend upon large, continuous ranges to maintain biodiversity. In short, the project looks at how crises for ‘housing and habitat’ evolved and may now be interacting with each other. In so doing, it aims to highlight the complex interactions between the “3 E’s” of equity, ecology, and economy under conditions of market-oriented urbanization; bridge often separate literatures in housing studies, urban political ecology, and conservation biology; and inform public policy and political movements aiming for housing, transportation, and multi-species justice within sustainable urban regions.
SLCC
Date: February 17, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
Unruly Landscapes of Environmental Change: Imagining a Future Himalaya
Andrea Nightingale, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
Attempts at governing ecological crises are just that: attempts. Life is far too unruly to quietly acquiesce to control and management raising uncomfortable questions about how to respond to current anxieties about anticipating the future. By starting from the unruliness and uncontrollability of life, this paper explores the continuous (re)configurations of humans and non-humans required to accomplish governing through conceptual ideas of boundary making. A focus on boundary making helps create new insights into the complex, often unpredictable political, social, cultural and ecological terrains that result in order to contribute towards a posthuman ethics of environmental governance. Drawing from scholars of science and political ecologists who have long pointed out that knowing is not somehow separate from the worlds we create, and feminist work on power and recognition, the paper looks at how boundary making reflects the operation of power across scales. It shows how environmental change programs are caught up in the riotous, inadvertent contradictions of environmental governance. Action, imagination, naming, and everyday practices create lasting connections; they bring the world into being in a continuous and dynamic manner demanding that we develop a more than human ethics. Using a case study of Nepal, the paper works through the entanglements of forests, user-groups, geopolitics and efforts at responding to predictions of calamitous change to show how they are complicit in producing the dilemmas we face.
SLCC
Date: January 27, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
The politics of climate change, uncertainty and transformation in marginal environments
Professor Lyla Mehta, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK; Visiting Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
The scale and impacts of climate change remain deeply uncertain. This is particularly true at the local level, where climate related uncertainties combined with unequal capitalist growth trajectories often exacerbate social and political inequities and the vulnerabilities of marginalised communities. Policy makers and scientists tend to draw on quantitative assessments, models and scenario building to understand and capture uncertainty. But these are often disconnected from how local people – particularly those living at the margins – make sense of and cope with uncertainty. This paper focuses on diverse and contested framings of climate change and uncertainty in three sites in South Asia (dryland Kutch, the Sundarbans delta and coastal Mumbai). It looks at how uncertainty is understood and experienced from ‘below’ by the lived experiences of local people, how it is conceptualised and represented from ‘above’ by climate scientists and experts and how the ‘middle’ – civil society, NGOs, academics – can potentially function as brokers between the ‘below’ and ‘above’. Uncertainty can be epistemic, ontological and linked to broader political economy conditions. Often official efforts to deal with uncertainty are highly policiticised and can increase the vulnerabilities of marginalised groups. While uncertainty can lead to anxieties about the future, I conclude by exploring whether it can also provide an opportunity to create transformation and structural change in marginal environments characterised by climate related uncertainties.
SLCC
Date: June 8, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Current Environmental Crisis
Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University
Human societies have developed very different trajectories of engagement with their environments over time. Some of these long-term relationships contain more potential for sustainability than others. Early human societies worshipped ‘nature beings’, including water serpent deities who manifested the elemental and generative powers of water. Such beliefs supported collaborative and reciprocal efforts to co-exist respectfully with the non-human world: a form of ‘conviviality’ that maintained highly sustainable lifeways. However, as many societies enlarged, became more hierarchical, and developed more instrumental technologies, they humanised their gods to worship their own rather than non-human powers. This produced ideas about ‘dominion’ over nature that, in prioritising human needs and interests at the expense of all others, have led directly to the current environmental crisis. Focusing on images and objects representing water serpent beings, and exploring what happened to these over time, this seminar draws on the cross-cultural comparison that is central to anthropology, as well as the temporal depth offered by history and archaeology, to ask what we can learn from earlier societies, and from the contemporary indigenous communities who retain traditional beliefs and values. Is there creative scope to incorporate the tenets of more sustainable modes of environmental engagement into contemporary debates about ‘rights for nature’? Can alternate worldviews assist societies in developing less anthropocentric ways of thinking about and engaging with the non-human world? In the face of contemporary realities, how can we re-establish more convivial human-environmental relations?
SLCC
Date: December 1, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
Damages Done: The Long-Term Impacts of Rising Disaster Costs on Wealth Inequality
James R. Elliott, Department of Sociology, Rice University
While climate science warns of long-term impacts that include the increased frequency and cost of natural disasters, social scientists rarely examine the long-term social consequences of such disasters and how we recover from them. This talk fills some of that gap. It begins by shifting disaster research from an event- to a population-centered framework. It then applies the tools of stratification research to a randomized sample of adults followed over fifteen years as natural hazards of varying types and levels of devastation hit the areas where they live. Results indicate that as local property damages from natural hazards increase, so too do inequalities in wealth accumulation over time, especially along the lines of race, education, and homeownership status. And, the more government spends on recovery aid in affected areas, the more those inequalities grow. Implications for theorizing and redressing climate injustices will be discussed.
SLCC
Date: November 10, 2020
Time: 4-5:30
The New U.S. Climate Battleground: Actors and Coalitions in the States
J. Timmons Roberts, Department of Sociology and Institute at Brown for Environment & Society, Brown University
Gridlock and rollback in Washington has led to a turn to the states for action on climate change in the U.S. The state of Massachusetts presents a particularly puzzling case, since it was an early leader with binding emissions targets, but the succeeding dozen years have seen most ambitious efforts stalled or watered down. We collected 1,187 pieces of legislative testimony, all reported lobbying visits, and input from over fifty experts. We describe the legislative interests, resource mobilization, and framings of the different coalitions engaged in Massachusetts energy politics. We find that clean energy advocates have few staunch allies and face a cohesive coalition of opponents from the real estate, fossil fuel and chemical, and utilities industries. Further, our analysis indicates the central role utilities play in blocking the most ambitious clean energy legislation, and how they remodel those bills that survive the process into forms favorable to their interests
SLCC
Date: October 13, 2020
Time: 13:00-14:30
Climate Futures’ Past: Insurance, Cyclones and Weather Knowledge in the Indian Ocean World
Debjani Bhattacharyya, Department of History, Drexel University
What are the historical antecedents to the contemporary financialization of climate threats through carbon markets or greening of asset portfolios? This talk argues for a longer colonial genealogy to the contemporary climate futures market, to show how British imperial expansion in the Indian ocean and the coterminous expansion of premium-based marine insurance shapes how we define weather disturbance and climate threats. Paleo-climatologists documented a spike in severe weather and tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal from the mid 1700s, a period when British Empire vastly expanded in the Indian ocean. Analyzing 18th-century merchants’ papers, Lloyd’s records, navigational journals and insurance cases fought in the marine courts in India and the admiralty courts in London shows that tropical cyclones, instead of becoming limits to be overcome simply through scientific forecasting, were instead financialized and made profitable through a brisk and thriving trade in speculative underwriting. These records reveal that actuarial experiments were not only central for garnering profit from the turbulence of the cyclonic Bay of Bengal but also created a colonial version of a derivatives market in climate futures. Such financialization of “natural limits” simultaneously laid the groundwork for nineteenth century theories of climate disturbance. Bridging histories of finance and Anthropocene scholarship the paper documents how the modalities, concepts and frameworks for producing knowledge about climate emanated out of the very webs of speculative finance, insurance and trade that enveloped the globe during this period. I conclude by arguing that turning to the Indian Ocean helps us understand how this space faced with the exigencies of global trade became a laboratory of actuarial experiments and weather knowledge production. It also allows us to identify a longer genealogy that shows that the very structures of climate knowledge-making based on ideas of profitability and the overcoming of ecological (and currently biospheric) limits is not simply a neoliberal story but were being scripted in the colonies from the latter half of the eighteenth-century.
SLCC
Date: March 23, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
At the Island’s Edge: Living and Learning Within Intersectional Ecologies
Amelia Moore, Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island
Centered around my experiences as a woman of color in the American academy, this talk spans eighteen years of research, exploring three projects that have shaped the way I think and work as an anthropologist of the Anthropocene. Studying interdisciplinary conservation science in The Bahamas revealed the contours of the Anthropocene Islands. Working with a coral restoration project in Indonesia made me aware of the techno-politics of witnessing. And learning to look beyond offshore wind farms in order to begin to see the island of Manisses in the state of Rhode Island brought forward collaborations and connections I hadn’t known I needed. Today, I am a small part of a network of diverse scholars who argue that we gain analytic and ethical insight from the intersections of theory, history, geography, social difference, ways of knowing, lived experiences, and forms of being. I will conclude by sharing how some of those insights have come to matter for my own situated academic practice.
SLCC
Date: February 16, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
Encountering Climate in Models and Materials
Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL
In this seminar I will present the main argument of my new book, Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, which came out last month. Based on ethnographic research that looked at attempts to bring climate science to bear on the governance of cities, the talk focuses on the experience of people living and working in Manchester, UK, and their encounters with the ambivalent materiality of climate models. To understand these encounters I suggest we need to develop an understanding of climate not as a representation of an existing reality but a ‘form of thought’ whose contours are relational, but yet tangible, and whose ramifications are still being worked out. Building on the argument of this book I point to the directions that this research is taking me in now, presenting some nascent ideas about how to continue research in climate-thinking and its world-transforming possibilities.
SLCC
Date: January 26, 2021
Time: 13:00-14:30
The (Applied) Epistemology of Resilience and Adaptation
Jesse M. Keenan, School of Architecture, Tulane University
This lecture maps out the emerging transdisciplinary field of adaptation science, including an exploration of the allied concepts of adaptation, resilience and risk mitigation. In particular, this lecture seeks to provide insight on the categorical variants of resilience and the extent to which these variants possess their own conceptual and analytical prowess. From here, resilience is understood not as a singular concept but a collection of concepts that have divergent meanings and applications that reinforce the necessity to understand subjective trade-offs that vary according to stakeholder orientation, time horizon, the distribution of associated costs and benefits, and the extent to which there may be both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. In this regard, resilience and adaptation are referenced as complex processes and not outcomes that represent absolute and universal goods. The lecture will conclude with how these diverse concepts are being applied in the United States at both the federal and state-level climate policy.
SLCC
Date: May 4, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
Ceasing the Means of Reduction: Toward a New Antiracist Approach to Community Solar Campaigns
Myles Lennon, Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment and Society & Anthropology, Brown University
Environmental justice activists in the U.S. have recently launched local solar campaigns to empower communities of color as part of their broader efforts for anti-racist climate justice. But these campaigns often prioritize what I call the means of reduction over the means of production. The means of reduction refers to the graphics, spreadsheets, and calculations that apprehend a good or service as capable of reducing negative phenomena such as carbon emissions or high electricity bills. By centering the means of reduction in their community solar campaigns, EJ activists overlook the extractive, exploitative, and capital-intensive material realities of solar technology production. In the process, they undercut their antiracist, climate justice goals. In this talk, I call for a new community solar campaign approach that shifts the focus from the means of reduction to the means of production. This approach repurposes the environmental justice concept of “co-pollutants” to illuminate environmental injustices throughout solar supply chains. It then addresses these injustices by: (1) leveraging economies of scale across marginalized communities in ways that prioritize solar technologies produced under safe, fair, and sustainable working conditions; and (2) fostering solidarity between marginalized communities on both ends of the supply chain.
SLCC
Date: November 16, 2021
Time: 16:30-18:00
What is Climate Resilience for All?
Lisa Schipper, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
This talk will focus on unpacking the idea of climate resilient development (CRD). While the climate is changing, many people are still living in extreme poverty and in circumstances that will make even the current amount of warming very difficult. Even if we stop emitting greenhouse gas emissions now, we still need to work hard at achieving sustainable development. However this means that we need to achieve development that is low carbon and we also need to integrate the changes in climate that we now have (ie, we need adaptation). This is the idea behind CRD – it takes into account that development still needs to happen, but emphasises that this development needs to be different to avoid making climate change worse and to build resilience to the changes that have already happened. What we know now is that there are several options that are no longer on the table due to the way that we have already changed the climate, however some pathways to climate resilience remain. However, there are two problems (1) that the window of opportunity to forge these pathways is rapidly closing and (2) the opportunities are not even for everyone around the world. The inequitable opportunities are driven by the underlying vulnerability to climate change, which creates a rift between the need to adapt to the impacts of climate change and the gap in development. Until we close the development gap and address the drivers of vulnerability, adaptation will be inadequate. I will also address these questions: Is CRD a non-concept that only offers a false sense of hope, when we know that most pathways for many people to achieve some sort of climate resilience are no longer available? Can the idea of climate resilient development become a new development paradigm? Can adaptation, plus mitigation, plus sustainable development be more than the sum of its parts?
SLCC
Date: November 30, 2021
Time: 11:00-12:30
Taking Renewables to Market: Prospects for the After-Subsidy Energy Transition
Brett Christophers, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University
The development of renewable energy resources is currently undergoing a sea-change. With the cost of key (solar and wind) technologies having significantly declined in the past decade, governments are widely reducing or even removing the subsidies and revenue guarantees that have supported the development of renewables to date. The renewables sector is struggling to stand commercially on its own feet, however: without the collateral of state support, it is often difficult for developers to secure affordable project financing. In this talk I discuss both this growing challenge to the energy transition and a principal mechanism to which renewables developers are turning to try to resolve it – the corporate power-purchase agreement (PPA). Under renewables PPAs, corporations ranging from cloud-computing providers to aluminium smelters contract to buy electricity from solar parks or wind farms at fixed or floor prices for periods of up to 15–20 years. Often crucial in enabling developers to raise finance, PPAs have been widely hailed as re-energizing a faltering energy transition. But to rely on the purchasing habits of the likes of Amazon and Google rather than the investment priorities of governments to maintain the shift into renewables is, of course, to raise important political, economic and ecological questions.
SLCC
Date: October 26, 2021
Time: 14:00-15:30
Can we Have Reproductive Justice in a Climate Crisis?
Jade Sasser, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside
Some climate scientists describe climate problems as problems of unrestrained population growth. Such discourses align closely with historical narratives blaming the fertility and reproduction of the poor, particularly women of color, for a range of social, political, economic, and environmental problems. In an era of ongoing climate crisis, can movements for reproductive justice and climate justice align? This talk explores the challenging ways population has been blamed for environmental and climate crises and how reproductive justice activists and scholars have resisted. From there, it investigates the possible ways social justice oriented approaches can help us navigate out of the reductive perspectives of population control.
SLCC
Date: March 22, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:30
Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System
Jerry Zee, Department of Anthropology and High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University
In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?
SLCC
Date: March 8, 2022
Time: 14:30-16:00
The Greening Imaginary: From Garden Cities to Climate Justice
Hillary Angelo, Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
From California to China, self-described “greening” efforts claiming to address inequality and the climate crisis proliferate. But why are such projects—undertaken in the name of ecological sustainability and climate resilience as well as quality of life—being carried out in such a wide range of places with very different histories, ecologies, and cultural repertoires for urban life? Based on a study of a century of greening in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region that has been recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, this talk offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a global, contemporary phenomenon. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by a social imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature; that urban processes, rather than city form, explain greening’s appearance; and that contemporary greening is best understood as fundamentally continuous with past practices. Through an analysis of California cities’ climate action plans, it then highlights the same logics of urban nature at work in contemporary climate adaptation and mitigation efforts and explores their consequences, particularly regarding conceptions of climate justice and equity.
SLCC
Date: February 1, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:30
Imagining Urban Futures: Adaptation and the Politics of Possibility in Jakarta
Emma Colven, Assistant Professor of Global Environment, University of Oklahoma
In 2020, the Indonesian President announced that the nation’s capital would be relocated away from Jakarta to East Kalimantan. His decision seemed to confirm what the media have already long been speculating: Jakarta is doomed. I reflect on the use and work of dystopian climate imaginaries, and what it means to forecast disaster and uninhabitability for cities that for many will continue to be home.
SLCC
Date: May 10, 2022
Time: 14:30-16:00
Sedimented Stories: Fluvial Forces and Natural Archives in an Unstable World
Alejandro Camargo, Department of History and Social Sciences, Universidad del Norte (Colombia)
Sediments are materials that tell stories about the past. For climatologists, paleoecologists and archaeologists, sediments are natural archives that preserve particles of organic and inorganic matter accumulated over time, whose study allows us to understand the climate, environmental transformations and human occupations of bygone eras. For historians and other social scientists, sediments are a metaphor for understanding the shaping and accumulation of human experience in historical time. But what kind of contemporary human experiences are woven around sediment not as a metaphor but as a material that circulates and accumulates in the landscape and quotidian spaces? What does sediment tell about the future of those subjects whose lives are deeply intertwined with the flux and accumulation of this element? For many people who inhabit rivers, streams and swamps in the Colombian Caribbean, sediment is part of their daily lives and, therefore, it shapes their memories and visions of the future in the midst of disaster, conflict, and inequality. The sediments remind them of stories of the life and death of rivers and swamps, as well as the prosperity and decay of rural life. For these people, the force of rivers is the engine that animates sediment. Thus, fluctuations in fluvial forces can allow life, but they can also produce disasters and agrarian conflicts through the erosion and accretion of sediment. Although in the Anthropocene humans are seen as a dominant planetary geological force, for these Caribbean inhabitants fluvial forces are stronger, surpass human control, and bring about ruin, exhaustion and desolation to their lives. Despite spreading climate adaptation discourses and intervention promising disaster control and ecosystem recovery in this region, fluvial forces seem to unfold rapidly thereby creating uncertainty and risk in the face of climate change. This presentation explores the social life of river forces and natural archives to understand how sediment can tellstories about people, and how people tell stories about sediment in an increasingly unstable world.
SLCC
Date: November 7, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:15
Late Acceleration: The Early 1970s Climate Shock and Carbon Autocracy in India
Elizabeth Chatterjee, Department of History, University of Chicago
One year before the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973, the global South was struck by a very different kind of energy crisis. A series of interlocking climate shocks ravaged agricultural heartlands around the planet, precipitating famines and electricity shortages just as oil prices began to spike. This early 1970s polycrisis briefly unlocked a radically new horizon of energetic possibilities that played out differently across the globe. Especially hard hit were poor oil-importing nations, still largely overlooked in the decade’s burgeoning historiography. In India, the largest of such nations, the combined climate-food-energy crisis brought a twinned set of fateful changes. By June 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship – the Emergency – for the first and only time in independent India’s existence, one amongst a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the postcolonial South. Less noticed was a second transformation with planetary ramifications. Rising popular expectations collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of coal, despie elite reservations about the environmental damage that would follow. Analyzing these dynamics is crucial to understand India’s rapidly rising carbon emissions, and offers evidence on the complex and troubling societal consequences of climate shocks.
SLCC
Date: October 24, 2022
Time: 16:00-17:15
Seawall Entanglements: Contested Futures and the Politics of Staying in Place
Summer Gray, Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara
This talk casts critical light on the fight to keep place where it is on the shore, examining the ways in which competing logics of adaptation mirror and intensify political struggle on the ground. As attention turns to newer and more experimental “soft” measures modeled on natural processes, seawalls and other “hard” measures have become deeply contested. Yet both pathways involve frameworks of resilience that can serve to undermine movements for social and climate justice. Of all the epicenters of this struggle, two places are particularly telling in their stories of seawall entanglements and the politics of staying in place: Guyana, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Maldives, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Together, they reveal how competing logics of adaptation are being tested and negotiated, blurring the line between “hard” and “soft” while challenging the political motivations and assumptions that accompany them. In these frontline nations, seawalls are both physical and symbolic boundaries around which desires for permanence collide through waves of oppression, attachments to place, and anticipations of loss.
SLCC
Date: March 13, 2023
Time: 16:00-17:15
Durable Derangements: The Making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road
Nikhil Anand, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
In this paper, I examine the making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road Project. How might we account for the production of a highway in a climate changed city, one that it is situated on made-up land that fills an increasingly restive, rising sea? Thinking with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016), I draw attention to the interests, aesthetics and technologies with which the road and is made durable. I argue that Mumbai Coastal Road is not made with “rational” plans, designs and studies of urban infrastructure. It is mobilized by the aesthetics of modernity (Ghertner 2015) and particular “habits of thought” (Benedict 1934) that privilege, valorize and assume the possibility of bourgeois regularity in the city; a deeply felt orientation and mode of intervening in the world that continues to produce the climate crisis, both in Mumbai and beyond.
SLCC
Date: March 8, 2023
Time: 14:00-15:30
Film Screening and Discussion
Achieving Justice when Stopping Oil: OFFSHORE Film Screening and Discussion
To limit climate change to 1.5°C, oil and gas production needs to be phased out in the near future. Next to challenges related to replacing hydrocarbons with alternative forms of energy, this disruption means for oil workers and regions to be confronted with the end of an industry that their livelihood and prosperity is depending on.
In this special event of the Social Life of Climate Change series, Dr Gisa Weszkalnys, Co-Investigator of the UKRI funded project “Fraying ties? Networks, territory and transformation in the UK oil sector”, sets the scene for the screening of OFFSHORE, a short film focusing on the situation of oil and gas workers that has been commissioned by the NGO Platform London. The director of the film, Hazel Falck, will join a discussion panel with Dr Gisa Weszkalnys, Gabrielle Jeliazkov, and Dr Connor Watt, for the final part of this event which will open the floor to questions from the audience.
SLCC
Date: February 8, 2023
Time: 17:00-18:30
Amongst Tigers: Sentinel Beasts on a Climate Frontier
Jason Cons, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin
This paper explores the ongoing invention of the Royal Bengal Tiger as a sentinel beast of global climate change in the Bangladesh Sundarbans. It asks how the production of the tiger as climate sentinel shapes a broader network of politics and relations in the contemporary Bengal Delta. As others have pointed out, the Royal Bengal Tiger—the Sundarbans’ most famous resident—has long been a potent figure of global imaginations of imperiled nature. This is doubly true in an era of climate change where tigers and their habitats have become tropical analogs to images such as polar bears on melting icebergs. Building on classic ethnographic engagements with the Sundarbans tiger, this paper outlines a contemporary tension between visions of a global tiger and its corporeal counterparts. It situates the tiger as not only a charismatic beast making its possible last stand in the imperiled mangroves, but also as inextricably enmeshed in land, human labor, and a broader web of predation. The region is, at least in part, constituted with and through the flesh and figure of the tiger. I frame the making of the tiger as sentinel beast not as a misrecognition but as a creation that shapes conservation, development, and claims on the delta’s future. In doing so, I map how tigers are entwined with the production of space, risk, and agrarian change in Sundarbans.
SLCC
Date: November 30, 2023
Time: 15:00-16:30
Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield
Yolanda Ariadne Collins, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews
Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies aimed at governing forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. In this talk about her forthcoming book, Collins will interrogate the implementation of the biggest and most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities, the United Nations endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighbouring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates where conservation efforts would be expected to have a relatively easy path. Yet, REDD+ has been fraught with challenges. The talk will situate these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It will advocate that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization. Forests of Refuge shows that pursuing decolonization in countries shaped almost entirely by the colonial encounter depends on reducing deference to the sovereign state in questions of environmental governance; removing the market from its increasingly central position as arbiter of environmental and social affairs; un-disciplining the racialized subjects of colonial governance, and amplifying those ethics and ways of being in the world that are associated with pre-colonial and non-Eurocentric knowledge traditions. In developing these arguments, Forests of Refuge contributes to three ongoing discussions: the feasibility of increasingly popular market-based tools for encouraging conservation within the neoliberal conservation literature; processes of racialization within critiques of the Anthropocene; and the possibility of decolonization within the critical development literature.
SLCC
Date: October 19, 2023
Time: 15:00-16:30
Digging in the Drylands: Labor and Landform in Nature-based Solutions
Leigh Johnson, Department of Geography, University of Oregon
Contemporary adaptation initiatives hinge upon the deployment of a remarkable amount of human labor, perhaps nowhere more so than in the implementation of “nature-based solutions” – from planting and maintaining seedlings, to building earthworks and drainage channels, to removing invasive species and clearing debris. By whom this work should be performed, where, and under what conditions, are complicated questions for both project implementers and climate justice advocates. In this talk, I focus on labor performed on pastoral rangelands in dryland East Africa, where hundreds of thousands of soil “bunds” – earthen semi-circles also called “half moons” – have been dug in recent years. These landforms have been championed by NGOs, humanitarian agencies, and local governments as low-tech, easily scalable interventions for rangeland restoration and climate adaptation. Because the creation of bunds at an effective scale requires mobilizing a tremendous amount of demanding manual labor from rural populations, diggers are often paid per bund for their work. I explore how the logic of piece rate work shapes adaptation labor and the landscapes it produces. This case also crystallizes some key questions for adaptation labor markets for other nature-based solutions: How are standardized wage rates constructed? What is the relative value of volunteered versus paid work? How are remunerative adaptation jobs distributed? And most confoundingly, what is the construction of an adaptive landform “worth”, and to whom?
SLCC
Date: March 8, 2024
Time: 14:00-15:30
Angola Prison’s Black Ecologies
Justin Hosbey, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
The Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as “Angola Prison,” is the largest maximum-security prison of the United States, and a landscape of overlapping, sedimented injustices. A site of ongoing, horrific human rights abuses, the prison is positioned in the wake of both racial slavery and settler colonialism. The 18,000-acre prison farm is located in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, two miles from the Louisiana-Mississippi border. This talk integrates spatial analysis, my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in southern Louisiana, and archival research from the Angolite prison newspaper and other relevant archives to analyze the ways that people incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola Prison farm experience the damaging effects of anthropogenic climate change. By situating these insights within what Françoise Vergès has named, “the racial capitalocene,” this project works to understand the race and class stratified impacts of anthropogenic climate change more fully by asking, “what happens to incarcerated people when carceral landscapes face the climate crisis?” Angola Prison is a critical site for understanding what happens to those considered “les damnés de la terre” in times of environmental catastrophe, and for highlighting their critiques of the carceral state in a time of mounting ecological crisis.
SLCC
Date: February 8, 2024
Time: 15:00-16:30
All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism
Patrick Bresnihan, Department of Geography, Maynooth University and Naomi Millner, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
This seminar take the form of a discussion with Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner about their new book, All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism (Bristol University Press 2023), which traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.