Lent Term 2022
Hillary Angelo
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
1 February 2022, 4.00pm - 5.30pm
The Greening Imaginary: From Garden Cities to Climate Justice
Jerry Zee
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University
8 March 2022, 2.30pm - 4pm
Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System
The seminar with Jerry Zee will take place in person, in room FAW.9.04, Fawcett Tower. If you would like to attend, you will need to show reception a negative COVID-19 test dated within 4 days of attending. You can find out more about LSE's COVID-19 rules here.
Jade Sasser
Associate Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside
22 March 2022, 4.00pm - 5.30pm
Can we Have Reproductive Justice in a Climate Crisis?
Michaelmas Term 2021
Prof Brett Christophers
Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University
26 October 2021, 2.00pm - 3.30pm
Taking Renewables to Market: Prospects for the After-Subsidy Energy Transition
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.
Lisa Schipper
Environmental Social Science Research Fellow, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford; Co-Editor-in-Chief, Climate and Development
30 November, 11.00am - 12.30pm
*New date*
Please note that this seminar was originally scheduled for 9 November.
What is climate resilience for all?
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?
Myles Lennon
Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment and Society & Anthropology, Brown University
16 November, 4.30pm - 6.00pm
Ceasing the Means of Reduction: Toward a New Antiracist Approach to Community Solar Campaigns
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.
Summer Term 2021
Dr Jesse M. Keenan, Tulane University School of Architecture
4 May 2021, 2-3:30pm
The (Applied) Epistemology of Resilience and Adaptation
Lent Term 2021
Dr Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL
Tuesday 26 January, 1-2:30pm
Encountering Climate in Models and Materials
Dr Amelia Moore, Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island
Tuesday 16 February, 2-3:30pm
At the Island’s Edge: Living and Learning Within Intersectional Ecologies
Dr Debjani Bhattacharyya, Department of History, Drexel University
Tuesday 23 March, 2-3:30pm
Climate Futures’ Past: Insurance, Cyclones and Weather Knowledge in the Indian Ocean World
Michaelmas Term 2020
Professor J. Timmons Roberts, Department of Sociology and Institute at Brown for Environment & Society, Brown University
Tuesday 13 October, 1-2:30pm, Zoom
The New U.S. Climate Battleground: Actors and Coalitions in the States
Professor James R. Elliott, Department of Sociology, Rice University
Tuesday 10 November, 4-5:30pm, Zoom
Damages Done: The Long-Term Impacts of Rising Disaster Costs on Wealth Inequality
Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University
Tuesday 1 December, 1-2:30pm, Zoom
Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Current Environmental Crisis
Summer Term 2020
Professor Lyla Mehta, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK; Visiting Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
June 8 (1-2:30pm U.K. time)
The politics of climate change, uncertainty and transformation in marginal environments
Lent Term 2020
Professor Andrea Nightingale, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
January 27 (1-2:30pm)
Unruly landscapes of environmental change: imagining a future Himalaya
Professor Miriam Greenberg, Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz
17 February 2020 (1-2:30pm)
The Housing/Habitat Project: Tracing Impacts of the Affordability Crisis in the Wildlands of Exurban California
Michaelmas Term 2019
Dr Gökçe Günel, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
21 October (6-7:30pm)
Book Launch: Spaceship in the Desert
Professor Paige West, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University
4 November (1-2:30pm)
A prayer for the world: Climate change, engaged scholarship and writing the future
Dr Daniel Aldana Cohen, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
11 November (1-2:30pm)
Follow the Carbon: Housing Movements and Carbon Emissions in the 21st Century City
Dr Andrew Curley, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2 December (1-2:30pm)
What is a Resource Curse?: Energy, infrastructure, colonialism, and climate change in Native North America
Summer Term 2019
Dr Nayanika Mathur, Department of School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, Oxford
13 May, 1-2:30pm
Crooked Cats: Human-Big Cat Entanglements in the Anthropocene
Lent Term 2019
Dr Jesse Goldstein, Department of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University
4 February, 1-2:30pm
From Planetary Improvement to Energy Abolition: Against and beyond the Transparent Energy of Whiteness
Dr Sarah Knuth, Department of Geography, Durham University
4 March, 1-2:30pm
Rentiers of the Green Economy? Placing Rent in Clean Energy Transition
Professor James McCarthy, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University
18 March, 1-2:30pm
Renewing accumulation? Political economies and ecologies of renewable energy
Michaelmas Term 2018
Dr Malini Ranganathan, School of International Service, American University
8 October, 1-2:30pm
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
Professor Elizabeth Shove, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
12 November, 1-2:30pm
DEMAND: Exploring the dynamics of energy, mobility and demand
Dr Megan Black, Department of International History, LSE
3 December, 1-2:30pm
Divided Legacies of the Landsat Satellite: The Origins of a Climate Science Tool in American Mineral Exploits, 1965-1980
Summer Term 2018
Dr Anne Rademacher, Program in Environmental Studies and Department of Anthropology, New York University
2 May, 4:30-6pm
Building Green: Forging Environmental Futures in Mumbai
Dr Liz Koslov, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
4 June, 4:30-6pm
The Fight for Retreat: Urban Unbuilding in the Era of Climate Change