Related to Items’ recent series on “Just Environments,” Kasia Paprocki and her colleagues discuss how what they call critical social science can be engaged in the study of and the response to climate change. In practice, this means being attuned to the potential tensions and complementarities between social knowledge production about and social action on behalf of addressing climate change and the inequalities it can deepen or transform. Drawing on their own and others’ research, the authors call attention to the “entanglement” of environmental issues with a host of other ones, the deployment of climate-friendly language for self-interested political purposes, and the importance of context in imagining movements for climate justice.
Daniel Aldana Cohen
Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2018–19). At Penn he founded and directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He is a political sociologist who works on the intersection of climate change, inequality, the built environment, and carbon accounting. He studies urban regions of the global North and South, especially New York and São Paulo, and is working on a book project on climate change and inequality in the twenty-first-century city. His writing has appeared in outlets such as Nature, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Public Culture, Jacobin, Dissent, The Nation, and The Guardian. Aldana Cohen is engaged in an emerging conversation about the Green New Deal Idea. He is presently coediting (and writing for) a special series on the Green Deal Deal for Jacobin magazine and co-organizing a major event, “Designing a Green New Deal,” in September 2019. @aldatweets.