LUCSUS seminars

Autumn programme 2025

The programme is updated continuously. 

January 22

Too hot, too cold: dwelling in discomfort as a question of thermal justice
11-12 in Maathai
Speaker: Alice Guilbert, doctoral researcher and assistant at the Institute of Environmental Sciences

In Switzerland, temperatures keep rising—mostly in cities—while energy systems are under increasing pressure; facing this dual challenge, new patterns of vulnerability and inequality emerge in accessing thermal comfort. This thesis aims to identify the roots of these disparities by examining the unequal distribution of climate extremes and the impacts of the energy crisis on everyday living conditions. Focusing on Geneva, the research unpacks thermal injustices to understand the dynamics and processes that produce inequalities in dwelling comfortably when facing uncomfortable temperatures.

February 5

Book Presentation: Insurgent ecologies between environmental struggles and postcapitalist transformations
11-12 in Ostrom
Speaker: Salvatore Paolo de Rosa, Center for applied ecological thinking, University of Copenhagen.
Discussant: Melissa García-Lamarca, LUCSUS

Insurgent Ecologies takes readers on an inspiring journey across key sites of ecological crisis and contestation, showing how revolutionary politics can emerge from the convergences between place-based, often disconnected struggles. These engaging essays speak to longstanding debates in political ecology around how to advance transformations in, against and beyond capitalism. The collection starts from the belief that environmental struggles across the Global South and North are a necessary component of such transformations. The book presents unique stories of the visions and strategies of struggles organised around sovereignty, land, climate, feminisms and labour, written by scholar-activists rooted in territories around the globe, offering locally grounded yet global perspectives. Each story reflects on how to build solidarity and comradeship across diverse struggles and how new political subjects and transformative collective projects for social-ecological justice are created.

Salvatore Paolo De Rosa's work spans the fields of anthropology, political ecology, and environmental humanities, with a focus on environmental conflicts, grassroots organising and climate justice movements. Currently, he studies the repression and policing of activism in Denmark and participates in anti-repression networks and organising. He's the co-editor, with Armiero and Turhan, of the volume Urban Movements and Climate Change (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). He's a founding member and editor of the collective Undisciplined Environments, and a collaborator of the independent media Napoli Monitor.

February 19

Transboundary Ecologies of War: Destruction, Resistance, and the Quest for Peace
11-12 in Maathai
Speaker: Pinar Dinc, Associate Professor and Researcher, Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University

This presentation explores how nature becomes both a victim and a site of resistance in protracted conflicts across Kurdistan. Focusing on rivers, forests, and agricultural lands that transcend state borders, it examines how ecological destruction—through dam projects, deforestation, and scorched-earth tactics—has been weaponised in war. At the same time, it highlights the Kurdish freedom movement's ecological turn, framing environmental justice and sustainability as integral to its transnational struggle. The lecture situates these dynamics within broader debates on conflict ecology and environmental peacebuilding, asking what it means to seek peace in landscapes scarred by war yet rooted in resilience.

March 5

Film screening and Q&A: Re-existences. Body, Art and Spirituality in defence of life
13-14 in Ostrom

Soraida Chindoy Buesaquillo, Inga indigenous leader
Solanyi Ordóñez, member of the Tent of Resistance
Valentina Lomanto-Perdomo, film director & PhD student, LUCSUS
Torsten Krause. Associate Professor, LUCSUS

This short documentary film narrates the socio-environmental conflict triggered by a large-scale copper mining project aimed at extracting critical minerals for the energy transition from the Andean Amazon. Through Theatre of the Oppressed and the voice of Soraida Chindoy Buesaquillo, indigenous territorial defender, the film narrates the process of the Tent of Resistance in Pueblo Viejo, Mocoa, describing the role of art and spirituality in the defence of life, water and territory against green extractivism.

About the film

This short film was crafted as part of a feminist decolonial research praxis, during a two-year Participatory Action Research (PAR) process and accompanying ethnographic work, developed through collaboration between a doctoral researcher and women territorial defenders in Mocoa, Putumayo. Methodologically, the film forms part of the systematic devolution of research outputs (in the sense proposed by Orlando Fals Borda), presented in formats that are accessible and usable by co-researchers and research participants, and that support the advancement of glocal agendas for social and environmental justice. Far from constituting a final research product, the film should be understood as research material that feeds the continuous cycles of action and reflection that characterise PAR. In this sense, it represents an effort not only to study reality but to actively contribute to its transformation.

March 12

The Politics of Adapting Expectations in Just Transformations
11-12 in Maathai

Eric Brandstedt, Associate Professor of Human Rights and Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy, Lund University

This seminar will focus on presenting a work-in-progress article that contributes to the philosophical discussion on justice in large-scale societal transformations. Central to this discussion is the concept of legitimate expectations (LE), which has been significantly addressed by scholars like Lukas Meyer and Santiago Truccone (2025). They highlight that individuals adversely affected by, e.g. the transition to a carbon-neutral society, may justifiably demand support if their legitimate expectations are unmet. However, this article argues that the LE framework obscures the analysis of who bears responsibility for fostering just societal change and what ought to be done. It reveals that analysing LE is not a good approach to clarifying the normative foundations of transitional social justice. This focus tends to misrepresent the issue as one solely concerning the conditions under which individuals deserve compensation for transitional costs from the state. While social expectations are essential, this article argues for broadening the conversation, addressing unreasonable expectations and recognising the collective responsibility of individuals, local communities, religious organisations, trade unions, and businesses for aligning social expectations with just societal goals. The call is for a forward-looking approach to adapting expectations to achieve just societal transformations, moving beyond mere compensation to a more comprehensive political strategy.

Eric Brandstedt's research focuses on justice issues related to climate change and climate policy. His overall motivation is to understand how a just transition to a fossil-free future can be achieved. He has investigated this in the field of climate ethics, in interdisciplinary collaborations, and through empirical and philosophical methods. In recent years, he has moved towards more concrete, local justice issues related to the climate transition, e.g. investigating the moral basis for perceived injustices in relation to wind power expansion and protests against high fuel prices. He also has general interests in political philosophy (e.g. concerning intergenerational justice, participatory methods in normative theory, and human rights).

March 26

“We can’t just sit here and wait” - saving Gotland’s energy transition in times of disrupted policy directionality
11-12 in Mathaai 

Henner Busch, Associate Professor, LUCSUS.

The Swedish island of Gotland was long seen as the frontrunner of the country's renewable energy transition. Recently, international and national developments have led to a state of policy turbulence endangering the island’s energy transition. In particular, policy direction has changed repeatedly since 2017. The development is defined by three events: the lack of transmission grid connection to the mainland, the cancellation of the “energy pilot” project and lastly, the cancellation of several large-scale offshore wind projects after a veto by the Swedish defence forces in response to the Russian threat. We investigate how the work of key actors (politicians, planners and intermediaries) is affected by disruptions in directionality, and how it affects the energy transition on the island. We collected data through interviews, field visits, observations and desk research. We find that repeated changes were highly disruptive to Gotland’s energy transition. Nevertheless, we find no indication of surrender but rather a sense of defiance amongst the interviewees. This renders the transition surprisingly resilient. Nevertheless, several informants indicated that they chose to wait instead of initiating new planning processes until the political climate had changed.

April 16

"Beans for change? Transforming the Colombian coffee landscape for socio-ecological sustainability" 
11-12 in Carson

Sinem Kavak, Researcher, LUCSUS
Lennart Olsson, Professor, LUCSUS
Mine Islar, Associate Professor, LUCSUS

In this seminar, we present our preliminary findings on the transformation of the Colombian coffee sector through a socio-ecological lens, focusing on the possibility of value recapture within a historically unequal global chain. As climate change increasingly affects coffee production in the global market, its local consequences remain uneven, shaped by the structure of the coffee value chain, regional specificities, political opportunity structures, and consumer demands.

We examine the promises and challenges of the speciality coffee segment as a pathway toward sustainability, rural development, and greater value capture for small-scale producers. We explore how Colombian coffee is materially and discursively instrumentalised for market repositioning, agrarian development, sustainability and even peacebuilding. Special attention is given to the impacts of these transformations on coffee producers and coffee pickers, whose livelihoods and working conditions remain central to the sustainability debate.  By focusing on the lived realities of producers and pickers, this research assesses whether these new "opportunity structures" can truly deliver sustainability or if they simply reorganise the existing challenges of the coffee landscape.

April 23

"Multiple forest uses and parallel land rights" 
11-12 in Maathai

David Harnesk, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher, LUCSUS
Malin Brännström,  Doctor of Law, Senior Researcher and the Director of Silvermuseet/INSARC

David Harnesk and Malin Brännström welcome you to a LUCSUS seminar that seeks to stimulate engagement with research on land rights and sustainability. We first introduce recent academic debates from commons research, critical property studies and environmental history that are of broader relevance to sustainability researchers. We then present and discuss two examples of research on land issues arising in contexts of multiple forest uses and parallel land rights, focusing on forestry and reindeer pastoralism (among the Indigenous Sámi people). Finally, we invite a broader discussion on research about land rights and sustainability.

David Harnesk has a thematic focus on land issues, social movements and methodology in sustainability transformations. His research is interdisciplinary and action-oriented, currently focusing on the climatic and environmental conditions of Indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralism, and its surrounding social and political mobilisation, in Sweden and Norway.

Malin Brännström is a leading expert on Sámi land rights and forestry legislation, and has extensive experience working in contexts characterised by competing land-use interests and high levels of conflict. She recently co-authored a chapter on Sámi land rights in the research anthology “Land, Water, Thoughts – consequences of Swedish policies for the Sámi” as part of the Truth Commission for the Sami People.

May 7

"What researchers think about the environmental crisis and how to respond: evidence from global surveys"
11-12 in Carson

Manuel Suter, Visiting Research Fellow, School of Social Work & LUCSUS

How do researchers understand the environmental crisis, and which responses do they recommend or perceive as feasible? This talk synthesises evidence from global surveys and experiments with academic experts across economics and environmental and sustainability-related fields. Across four studies, I show that (1) environmental scientists list a broader set of environmental challenges than economists, and recognising more issues is linked to greater support for far-reaching mitigation approaches; (2) academics diverge strongly in their beliefs about “green growth”, with endorsement closely tied to views on the role of economic growth for human well-being; (3) experts’ preferences for “optimal” GDP development are highly sensitive to framing; and (4) many sustainability policy researchers view a range of policy instruments discussed in post-growth scholarship as both feasible and high-potential.