Dean of The Global School, Mimi Sheller, to Speak in Sweden and Denmark

Dean of The Global School, Mimi Sheller, will be giving a series of invited lectures in Sweden and Denmark in August, including these events in Aalborg, Stockholm, and Linköping.

TRANSPLACE Lecture, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden 

On August 19, KTH will host Dean Sheller for an open lecture in the Transformation in the Interface of Planning (TRANSPLACE) research school. Sheller is a member of the TRANSPLACE school's Scientific Advisory Board, where she contributes international perspectives on the research school's themes and provides input to various doctoral and postdoctoral projects. Sheller will discuss equity and justice within future scenarios for low-carbon mobility transitions, and will also meet with doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. 

KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm is one of Europe's leading technical and engineering universities. TRANSPLACE is a research school for the acceleration of sustainability transformation at the intersection between urban development and transport planning through reflexive capacity building. 

TRANSPLACE is operated by the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in cooperation with Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge at Södertörn University, Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University, and The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI).

Planning in Transition lecture series at Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

On August 20, Sheller will be an invited speaker at the Planning in Transition lecture series at Linköping University. Linköping University is an innovation university organized around multidisciplinary departments. The international public lecture series Planning in Transition engages with contemporary critical challenges in urban and regional development such as climate change, digitalization or social inequality. This edition of lectures will focus on the theme of sustainable mobilities to bring together innovative thinkers in the field and develop interesting perspectives on mobility in the context of environmental problems and climate change. Sheller’s lecture is entitled “How can sustainable mobilities be made more just?” There is a Zoom option for participation.

Abstract

The sustainable mobilities transition raises dilemmas around mobility justice. What if building decarbonized green infrastructure displaces lower-income communities, hurts existing workers, only benefits kinetic elites, and is driving ecologically destructive extraction of transition metals? This talk asks us to re-think climate change, climate mobilities, and climate adaptation as problems of mobility in/justice within sustainable mobilities.

MOBILITIES CONTROVERSIES - PLACE, JUSTICE, DEMOCRACY. International Conference at the Center for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS), Aalborg, Denmark

Sheller is an invited keynote speaker at the international conference on Mobilities Controversies: Place, Justice, Democracy. It will take place at Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark, August 22-23. Anthony Elliott and Nikolaj Schultz are the other keynote speakers. Sheller’s keynote address will take place at 4:30pm on August 22nd, on the topic of mobility justice and its implications for climate justice, urban sustainability, and democracy.

The conference theme focuses on “wicked problems” in which we find mobilities to be at the very heart of controversy: “The sheer magnitude of moving of matter, goods, people, information, data, virus, weapons etc. should make it clear that we are facing serious global challenges. Next to this ‘hypermobility’ we are also facing problematic immobility or restricted mobility as for instance when humans are moving for survival but curbed on their mobilities due to ‘politicized forms of friction’.”  The conference will bring together several fields of policy and planning, as well as multiple research disciplines that offer different interpretations of the causes and consequences of these complex and contested mobilities.