Day 10 - Julia Steinberger: Struggle for survival: The importance of climate activism from the ...

ISC 2021 Summer School – Cognitive Challenges of Climate Change (https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites...)

Day 10
Talk by Julia Steinberger: Struggle for survival: The importance of climate activism from the perspectives of political economy and science communication
MC: Stevan Harnad, Professor of Psychology (cognitive sciences) at UQAM and at McGill and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southampton.

Abstract:
Climate activism is crucial for any sustained progress on climate action. I will discuss this from two systemic perspectives in social science: political economy and science communication. I will explore what the terms "fossil capitalism" and "captured state" mean in reality and for activism, in particular through the lens of the political economy of dependence on cars. I will build on this systemic understanding to draw lessons for the role, potential and necessity of social organizing and activism.

References:
Pirgmaier, E. and J.K. Steinberger (2019) Roots, Riots, and Radical Change—A Road Less Travelled for Ecological Economics. Sustainability 11(7). 
Mattioli, M., D. Roberts, J.K. Steinberger and A. Brown (2020) The political economy of car dependence: a systems of provision approach. Energy Research and Social Science.
Steinberger, J. K. (2019) A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change. Medium.com .

Bio:
Julia Steinberger is a Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Lausanne. From 2011 to 2020, she was an associate professor in ecological economics at the University of Leeds. Before she was a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna (SEC), where she investigated sustainable cities and the links between material use and economic performance, held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Lausanne and Zurich, and obtained her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research examines the connections between resource use (energy and materials, greenhouse gas emissions) and societal performance (economic activity and human wellbeing).

She received a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for her research project 'Living Well Within Limits' investigating how universal human well-being might be achieved within planetary boundaries. She was the Lead Author in working group 3 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)6th Assessment Report, contributing to the report's discussion of climate change mitigation pathways.