Two decades after Automobile Politics: cultural political economies of stability and transformation

The seminar opens with an overview of the field of cultural political economy based on the legacy of the book “Automobile Politics”, which draws out the linkages between everyday life and global climate politics through the case of automobility.

The author of the book, Matthew Paterson, will then reflect upon the current state of the cultural political economy of climate change and use it as a lens to understand both how the unsustainability of the current world order is sustained, and how it can be challenged to accomplish a low-carbon transition. This is followed by presentations which apply a cultural political economy lens to theorize specific climate problems, one emphasizing stability and one focusing on transformation. 

The presentations are followed by a panel discussion and Q&A.

Chair: Johannes Stripple, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University.  

Speakers

• Jacob Hasselbalch: Two decades after automobile politics
• Matthew Paterson: The current state of the cultural political economy of climate change
• Karl Holmberg: Stability - Plastics
• Sara Ullström: Transformation - Flying

Speaker biographies

Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester and Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. His research focuses on the political economy, global governance, and cultural politics of climate change. His latest book is In Search of Climate Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and previous publications include Global Warming and Global Politics (1996). He is currently starting a project on the political economy of energy transitions, especially focused on the disruption to supply chains these transitions entail.

Jacob Hasselbalch is an Associate Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. His research is broadly concerned with the political economy of sustainability transformations. Current research topics include expert networks in industrial decarbonization, green economic planning, alternative organizations in plastics and the circular economy, and the politics of green growth versus post-growth in the global economy. You can find his research published in Review of International Political Economy, Environmental Politics, Journal of European Public Policy and Organization Studies, among other places.’

Karl Holmberg is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science of Lund University. His research focuses on the cultural political economy of plastic disposability. Karl writes his PhD thesis on how disposable plastics came to be embedded into the Swedish society between 1945 and 1973, focusing on the development of self-service stores, disposable milk packaging, the petrochemical cluster and waste management infrastructure.

Sara Ullström is a PhD candidate at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS). Her research is concerned with the cultural politics of demand-side climate mitigation, with empirical focus on aeromobility. Specifically, she examines the role of alternative discourses and everyday practices in challenging high-carbon ways of life and enabling cultural change. 

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