February 2024
Equity, energy and just transitions
February 1, 2024
Innovation Studio 203
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
The urgency, emergency, and necessity of low-carbon transitions is a given in most regions of the world. But low-carbon innovations, technologies, practices and policies can unintentionally exacerbate a series of inequities and inequalities with energy production and use. This presentation introduces conceptions of Just Transitions and energy justice as a way to remediate these concerns. It utilizes a novel framework looking at demographic inequities (between groups), spatial inequities (across geographic scales), interspecies inequities (between humans and non-humans), and temporal inequities (across present and future generations). This framework enables not only the identification of multiple and often interlinked inequities; it also points the way towards how to make low-carbon transitions more sustainable and just, with direct implications for business practices (and supply chains) as well as energy and climate policy.
REGISTER HERE: https://wpi.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dheQYMIHcwsJIAm
Benjamin K. Sovacool is the Director of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) and a Professor in the Department of Earth & Environment. He works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to global energy policy and politics, energy security, energy justice, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation. More specifically, his research focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, the ethics and justice of energy, and building adaptive capacity to the consequences of climate change.
November 2023
Caribbean Climate Knowledge-to-Action: Critical Reflections on Locally-led Action, Disaster Preparedness, and Climate Education
NOVEMBER 10, 2024
Campus Center Odeum A&B
3:30pm - 5:00pm
A panel discussion to kick off the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) conference featuring WPI's Global School Dean, Mimi Sheller, Stacy-ann Robinson of Colby College, Kevon Rhiney, from Rutgers University, and Nigel Brissett, Clark University.
This panel is organized around the themes of challenges of climate change adaptation strategies and climate reparations, including locally-led action, disaster preparedness and climate education. Examples will be drawn from Puerto Rico, the Hispanic Caribbean, and the Anglophone Caribbean region, including how both independent and non-independent territories are building climate knowledge-action networks and seeking to mobilize political-ecological claim-making across linguistic and jurisdictional differences.
September 2023
Erosion By Design: Sea Defenses in Guyana
September 8, 2023
Campus Center Odeum A&B
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Sarah will explore the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. Focusing on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, she show’s engineers’ decision-making regarding whether or not to innovate sea defenses which is a fraught process dependent upon processes of erosion and the ontological (in)stability of specific infrastructures known as groynes. These dilemmas remind us that issues of innovation can create paralysis and haunt even the most elite spaces of climateadaptation. Experts in climate adaptation arenas have the desire to create all kinds of affective attachments with people, things, places, and environments. I focus on their desire for a different, perhaps a more hospitable kind of world—shaped by their efforts to perform and demonstrate their credibility to others.
Sarah E. Vaughn is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and writing have contributed to understandings of climate adaptation across the circum-Caribbean, particularly among experts in coastal Guyana and Bermuda. Working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and science and technology studies, Vaughn’s research agenda is invested in examining how technology mediates people’s experiences of climate change. Her writing has appeared in numerous academic journals as well as in literary and environmental magazines, and she is the author of the award-winning book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke, 2022).