Social Life of Climate Change
Seminar Series
These research seminars are interdisciplinary discussions around contemporary debates in the humanistic social sciences of climate change and the environment.
Events take multiple formats, including standard seminar format as well as more engaged discussions of relevant readings and works in progress.
The seminars are open to all. If you would like access to any of the upcoming seminars please email geog.research@lse.ac.uk.
If you'd like to join our mailing list, please sign up here.
The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environment, the Department of Sociology and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
It is organised by Kasia Paprocki (k.paprocki@lse.ac.uk) and Austin Zeiderman (a.zeiderman@lse.ac.uk) of the Department of Geography and Environment and Rebecca Elliott (r.elliott1@lse.ac.uk) of the Department of Sociology.
Please contact Kasia Paprocki with any questions. Updates can be found on X and on the SLCC website.
Winter Term 2026
Research is a Land Relation
3 February 2026, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Prof Max Liboiron, Professor in Geography at 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, Dr. 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.
Climate Methodologies: A Dialogue on the Social Life of Environmental Knowledge
9 February 2026, 4-5.30pm, OLD 3.24
Prof Harriet Bulkeley, Professor in the 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.
Atlantic Transitions: Freedom and Justice from Abolition to Climate Change
3 March 2026, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Dr Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor, Department of International History, LSE with Prof Austin Zeiderman, Professor in 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.
The Market that Cannot Know Itself: Missing the Forest for the Trees in Carbon Crediting Schemes
24 March 2026, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Dr Javier Lezaun, Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and 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.
Autumn Term 2025
Dr Danielle Purifoy (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Tuesday 14 October 2025, 4.30pm-6pm
Old Building, 3.24 (Sociology department meeting room)
"Forests are Black Futures"
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.
Prof Laura Pulido (University of Oregon and LSE) and Prof Marco Armiero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Tuesday 11 November 2025, 5pm-6.30pm
PAR.LG.03, Parish Hall
"The Point Is to Change It: A Conversation between Environmental Activist-Scholars"
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.
Prof Alice Mah (University of Glasgow)
Tuesday 2 December 2025, 5pm-6.30pm
Old Building, 3.24 (Sociology department meeting room)
"Inheritance, Ghosts, and the Future: Sociological and Life Writing amid the Climate Crisis"
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?
See a review of Red Pockets: An Offering in The Guardian here.