Cluster leader: Alexios Antypas
Faculty associated with the cluster: Guntra Aistara, Tamara Steger, Anke Schaffartzik
Transformative Society, Politics and Justice (TSPJ) is a platform for critical inquiry and deliberative analysis that addresses environmental challenges through collaborative research, politically engaged approaches, and a commitment to fostering a world that is governable, socially just and sustainable. Despite a high level of awareness, current trends in environmental and resource governance continue to lead to environmentally unsustainable and socially inequitable outcomes in which the global and local environments and the prospects for human flourishing continue to deteriorate. GPJ investigates environmental regimes, environmental law, the integration of environmental policy into other policy sectors, the science/policy interface and the processes of integrating environmental information into policy and comparative environmental policy analyses. It takes a critical and complex stand on the conceptualizations of nature and culture, and how they structure social wellbeing, scientific inquiry, and environmental problem-solving, particularly in light of diverse environmental values and ethics, power dynamics and competition over policy preferences, and conceptions of environmental well-being and justice. Along those lines, further thematic areas of interest include global environmental governance and environmental and social justice issues, conflicts and movements, the political ecology of food sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and extractive industries and the environmental history of contemporary debates in countries of Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.
Associated working groups:
· ACT JUST: Environmental & Social Justice Action Research Group
(past initiatives: Environmental Arts and Humanitives Initiative)
Recent and on-going projects:
· Horizon 2020 Project (2019-2022): Urban Arena for Sustainable and Equitable Solutions (URBANA)
· Far-right environmentalism in Eastern Europe and the development of Rio Principle 10
· The role of the vegan movement within environmentalism
· Effects of Trump Administration policies on energy transition of the US Dept of Defense
Research highlights:
1. Aistara, G.A., 2018. Organic Sovereignties: Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
2. Aistara, G.A., 2014. Actually existing tomatoes: politics of memory, variety, and empire in Latvian struggles over seeds. Focaal, 2014(69): 12-27.
3. Antypas, Alexios. 2019 (forthcoming). “COP24, the Paris Rulebook and Diminished Expectations for COP25,” Environmental Liability.
4. Antypas, Alexios. 2019 (forthcoming). “A Global Pact for the Environment and the Effort to Secure Global Environmental Norms,” Environmental Law and Management.
5. Antypas, Alexios. 2017. "Putting Meat on the Agenda: The Kornoivia Joint Work on Agriculture and the Effort to Link Animal Agriculture and Climate Change at the UNFCCC." Environmental Liability. 35 (3).
6. Duprey, Brendan and Alexios Antypas. 2018. “Natura 2000: Bulgaria’s Park “On Paper,” Employment and Economy in Central and Eastern Europe. 7 (1).
7. Josephson, P., Dronin, N., Mnatsakanian, R., Cherp, A., Efremenko, D. and Larin, V., 2013. An environmental history of Russia. Cambridge University Press.
8. Steger, T. 2019. Inequalities in Inability to Keep the Home Adequately Warm. WHO Environmental Health Inequalities in Europe. Second Assessment Report.
9. Steger, T., R. Filcak, & K. Harper. 2018. Environmental Justice in Central and Eastern Europe: Mobilization, Stagnation, and Detraction. In Holifield, R., Chakraborty, J., Walker, G (Eds). The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice. London: Routledge.
10. Steger, T. and M. Milicevic. 2014. One Global Movement, Many Local Voices: Discourse(s) of the Global Anti-Fracking Movement. In Liam Leonard, Sya Buryn Kedzior (ed.) Occupy the Earth: Global Environmental Movements (Advances in Sustainability and Environmental Justice, Volume 15) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, p. 1 - 35.
11. Fletcher, R., B. Dowd-Uribe, and G. Aistara (eds). 2020. The Ecolaboratory: Environmental Governance and Economic Development in Costa Rica. University of Arizona Press.
12. Coomes, O., S. McGuire, E. Garine, S. Caillon, D. McKey, E. Demeulenaere, D. Jarvis, G. Aistara, A. Barnaud, P. Clouvel, L. Emperaire, S. Louafi, P. Martin, F. Massol, M. Pautasso; C. Violon; J. Wencelius. 2015. “Farmer Seed Networks make a Limited Contribution to Agriculture? Four Common Misconceptions,” Food Policy, 56 (2015): 41-50.