Social Life of Climate Change

The Social Life of Climate Change 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.

Autumn Term 2026

Madeleine Fairbairn, UC Santa Cruz
6 October, 5-6.30pm

“Just another asset class”? Farmland as a financial investment

As climate change intensifies pressures on agricultural land and water systems, financial actors are increasingly buying farmland and working to transform it into a financial asset class. This transformation is constrained, however, by the unique material and social properties of farmland, which have historically limited its full commodification and continue to present obstacles to its financialization. In response to these constraints, the industry is deploying new metrics, narratives, and investment vehicles that aim to make farmland legible and accessible to mainstream investors. This presentation describes these asset-making efforts while also touching on the impacts of farmland financialization on the ground, from California, where farmland value is inseparable from groundwater access to the Mississippi Delta, where farmland investment intersects with histories of racialized dispossession.

Ryan Cecil Jobson, University of Chicago
10 November, 5-6.30pm

What the Petro-state Does Do: Power in the Caribbean After 1973

Prepared as a postscript to the insights of my first book, The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Chicago Press, 2024), this presentation offers a genealogy of the petro-state form in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of 1973. Indeed, the conjuncture of 1973-1974 proved decisive for the Caribbean region, inaugurating price shocks and sovereign debt for oil-importing nations such as Jamaica and fantasies of windfall profits and limitless growth for hydrocarbon-rich nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. At this historic juncture, all states were compelled to regard petroleum as a windfall blessing or fiscal encumbrance rather than a simple commodity. Paired with an analysis of the contemporary Caribbean hydrocarbon triangle of Venezuela, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this genealogy requires us to confront petro-state not only as a fixed political form, but as a structuring principle of Caribbean political life after 1973.

Raj Patel, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
1 December, 5-6.30pm

The World-Ecology of Shack Dwelling in the Interregnum

From Genoese to US hegemony, systemic cycles of accumulation have ended in conflict and the progressive internalization of systemic costs. US hegemony is ending in polycrises, and shading into an interregnum. This talk uses a world-ecological framework to derive the futures that might follow, focusing on the most hopeful of five possible scenarios, and on a movement already practising alternative ways of organizing collective life.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African shack dwellers’ movement representing some 180,000 people, collectively confronts the social-reproductive costs of shelter, food, care, and climate change. Examining its practices reveals both the possibilities of life beyond the present hegemonic order and the obstacles such alternatives must overcome—particularly the power of money and state violence. In doing so, the talk considers what a world-ecological analysis can tell us about building a just and sustainable world after American hegemony.