Social Life of Climate Change

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 .

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 and on the .

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 番茄社区) and Prof Marco Armiero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Tuesday 11 November 2025, 5pm-6.30pm
Old Building, 3.24 (Sociology department meeting room)

"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)
Wednesday 3 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 .

Spring Term 2025

Austin Zeiderman (番茄社区)
Wednesday 14 May 2025, 6-7.30pm
MAR 1.08, Marshall Building

"Ecologies of difference: A discussion of Austin Zeiderman's Artery"

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, , 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.

Watch the trailer for the book .

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.

Sarah Besky (Cornell University) and Shaila Seshia Galvin (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies)
Tuesday 10 June 2025, 11am-12.30pm
Graham Wallas Room, Old Building

"Climate methodologies: A dialogue on the social life of environmental knowledge"

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.

Winter Term 2025

Nikita Sud, University of Oxford
Thursday 30 January 2025, 3-4:30pm
Unjust energy transition: Vignettes from the COPs, climate finance, and a coal hotspot

Tao Leigh Goffe, Hunter College, City University of New York
Tuesday 4 March 2025, 5-7pm
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

Jessica Lehman, Durham University
Thursday 13 March 2025, 3-4:30pm
The Ocean at the end of history

Autumn Term 2024

Tianna Bruno, University of California Berkeley
Thursday 10 October, 3-4:30pm
Archival Encounters: Writing on Black Ecological Memory

Jamie Cross, University of Glasgow
Thursday 21 November, 3-4:30pm
Planetary Mould: More than Human Thermofixes for 1.5 Degrees

Spring Term 2024

Patrick Bresnihan, Maynooth University and Naomi Millner, University of Bristol
Tuesday 21 May, 2:30-4pm
All We Want is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism

Winter Term 2024

Justin Hosbey, University of California, Berkeley
Thursday 8 February, 3-4:30pm
Angola Prison’s Black Ecologies

Leigh Johnson, University of Oregon
Friday 8 March, 2-3:30pm
Digging in the drylands: Labor and landform in nature-based solutions

2023

Yolanda Ariadne Collins, University of St Andrews
19 October, 3-4.30pm
Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield

Jason Cons, University of Texas, Austin
30 November, 3-4.30pm
Amongst Tigers: Sentinel Beasts on a Climate Frontier

Achieving Justice when Stopping Oil: OFFSHORE Film Screening and Discussion
8 February, 5pm-6.30pm
Discussants: Gisa Weszkalnys (番茄社区), Associate Professor of Anthropology | Hazel Falck, Independent Filmmaker | Gabrielle Jeliazkov (Platform London), Just Transition Campaigner | Connor Watt (番茄社区), Post-Doc Anthropology

Nikhil Anand, University of Pennsylvania
8 March, 2pm-3.30pm
Durable Derangements: The Making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road

Summer Gray, University of California, Santa Barbara
13 March, 4pm-5.15pm
Seawall Entanglements: Contested Futures and the Politics of Staying in Place

2022

Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago
24 October, 4-5:15pm
Late Acceleration: The Early 1970s Climate Shock and Carbon Autocracy in India

Alejandro Camargo, Universidad del Norte (Colombia)
7 November, 4-5:15pm
Sedimented stories: Fluvial forces and natural archives in an unstable world

Emma Colven, University of Oklahoma
10 May, 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Imagining Urban Futures: Adaptation and the Politics of Possibility in Jakarta

Hillary Angelo, University of California Santa Cruz
1 February, 4.00pm - 5.30pm
The Greening Imaginary: From Garden Cities to Climate Justice

Jerry Zee, Princeton University
8 March, 2.30pm - 4pm
Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System

Jade Sasser, University of California, Riverside
22 March, 4.00pm - 5.30pm
Can we Have Reproductive Justice in a Climate Crisis?

2021

Brett Christophers, Uppsala University
26 October, 2.00pm - 3.30pm
Taking Renewables to Market: Prospects for the After-Subsidy Energy Transition

Lisa Schipper, University of Oxford; Co-Editor-in-Chief, Climate and Development
30 November, 11.00am - 12.30pm
What is climate resilience for all?

Myles Lennon, Brown University
16 November, 4.30pm - 6.00pm
Ceasing the Means of Reduction: Toward a New Antiracist Approach to Community Solar Campaigns

Jesse M. Keenan, Tulane University School of Architecture
4 May, 2-3:30pm
The (Applied) Epistemology of Resilience and Adaptation

Hannah Knox, UCL
26 January, 1-2:30pm
Encountering Climate in Models and Materials

Amelia Moore, University of Rhode Island
16 February, 2-3:30pm
At the Island’s Edge: Living and Learning Within Intersectional Ecologies

Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
23 March, 2-3:30pm
Climate Futures’ Past: Insurance, Cyclones and Weather Knowledge in the Indian Ocean World

2020

J. Timmons Roberts, Brown University
13 October, 1-2:30pm, Zoom
The New U.S. Climate Battleground: Actors and Coalitions in the States

James R. Elliott, Rice University
10 November, 4-5:30pm, Zoom
Damages Done: The Long-Term Impacts of Rising Disaster Costs on Wealth Inequality

Veronica Strang, Durham University
1 December, 1-2:30pm, Zoom
Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Current Environmental Crisis

Lyla Mehta, University of Sussex, UK; Norwegian University of Life Sciences
June 8 (1-2:30pm U.K. time)
The politics of climate change, uncertainty and transformation in marginal environments

Andrea Nightingale, University of Oslo
January 27 (1-2:30pm)
Unruly landscapes of environmental change: imagining a future Himalaya

Miriam Greenberg, 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

2019

Gökçe Günel, Rice University
21 October (6-7:30pm)
Book Launch: Spaceship in the Desert

Paige West, Barnard College and Columbia University
4 November (1-2:30pm)
A prayer for the world: Climate change, engaged scholarship and writing the future

Daniel Aldana Cohen, University of Pennsylvania
11 November (1-2:30pm)
Follow the Carbon: Housing Movements and Carbon Emissions in the 21st Century City

Andrew Curley, 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

Nayanika Mathur, Department of School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, Oxford
13 May, 1-2:30pm
Crooked Cats: Human-Big Cat Entanglements in the Anthropocene

Jesse Goldstein, Virginia Commonwealth University
4 February, 1-2:30pm
From Planetary Improvement to Energy Abolition: Against and beyond the Transparent Energy of Whiteness

Sarah Knuth, Durham University
4 March, 1-2:30pm
Rentiers of the Green Economy? Placing Rent in Clean Energy Transition

James McCarthy, Clark University
18 March, 1-2:30pm
Renewing accumulation? Political economies and ecologies of renewable energy

2018

Malini Ranganathan, American University
8 October, 1-2:30pm
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC

Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University
12 November, 1-2:30pm
DEMAND: Exploring the dynamics of energy, mobility and demand

Megan Black, 番茄社区
3 December, 1-2:30pm
Divided Legacies of the Landsat Satellite: The Origins of a Climate Science Tool in American Mineral Exploits, 1965-1980

Anne Rademacher, New York University
2 May, 4:30-6pm
Building Green: Forging Environmental Futures in Mumbai

Liz Koslov, MIT
4 June, 4:30-6pm
The Fight for Retreat: Urban Unbuilding in the Era of Climate Change

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番茄社区