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.
Kasia Paprocki
Kasia Paprocki is assistant professor in environment in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. She holds a PhD in development sociology from Cornell University. Her research is focused on the political economy of development and agrarian change and she is currently completing a book on the political ecology of climate change adaptation in South Asia. She has worked in Bangladesh since 2006, often in collaboration with Nijera Kori, Bangladesh’s largest landless peasant movement. Her writing has been published in academic and popular outlets including Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode, Geoforum, Climate and Development, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Quarterly, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, and Himal Southasian. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and a 2013 SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship. @KasiaPaprocki.