I'm delighted to be awarded a generous grant from the Swedish Research Council for timely and important research on "Disassembling the power of high-carbon imaginaries" in Poland and the UK. The grant is part of the call for Research Environment Grant within Humanities and Social Sciences.
The persistence of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, cannot be prevented solely by assembling new energy systems and institutions that support them. Equal attention must be placed on disassembling old but powerful and seemingly-durable fossil fuel incumbencies. The overall purpose of my project is to critically examine and better understand how powerful carbon-intensive imaginaries can be disempowered to accelerate low-carbon transition.
The study also involves Professor Gavin Bridge from Durham University, Department of Geography and Mikael Höök, Associate Professor in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development. The project is a collaboration between Uppsala University and Durham University.
We aim to conduct our research in two “carbonscapes” associated with Poland’s deep-mined hard coal (Upper Silesia Region) and with open-pit brown coal (Wielkopolska and Łódź Regions), as well as two “carbonscapes” associated with the UK’s offshore oil in the North Sea and with the onshore petrochemical industry via the case of Teeside in the North East of England.
Read more about the project [ HERE ]