Session Overview

Are we stuck? Exploring New Directions for Decarbonisation Research

Chair

Johannes Stripple

Discussant

Harriet Bulkeley

Speakers

Joost Vervoort

Judith Van Leeuwen

Lars Nilsson

Sarah Burch

Simon Dalby

Steven Bernstein

Abstract

Urgent, radical and rapid changes from a high carbon society is often voiced yet little heeded. Writings from across the social sciences have drawn attention to how forms of intervention aimed at destabilising carbon are emerging — from technical innovations and new agents of change to the experimental city. While the ‘stickiness’ of carbon across domains as diverse as the retail supermarket to the investment portfolios of multinational corporations has been widely noted, research has primarily focused on the ways in which changes to de-carbonise society are taking place and could be imagined. Yet the very stability/inertia of carbon which such interventions aim to overcome remain relatively unexplored. Rather than assuming that this condition is natural or static, the semi-plenary will explore the diverse contexts and means through which carbon is maintained and the ways in which its being unsettled. The title of the semi-plenary — ’Are we stuck’ — is meant to play on the idea that we have not really understood how and why we are stuck in a high carbon world, but it is also a provocation to not to get stuck as researchers when thinking about this predicament.