Keynote Speakers

Andrew Pickering | Closer to the World: Doing Without Science

Andrew Pickering is internationally known as a leader in the field of Science and Technology studies. He held the Chair of Sociology at the University of Exeter, and is since 2015 an Emeritus Professor in the Department. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of London (1973), as well as a PhD in Science Studies from the University of Edinburgh (1984). He was a Professor of Sociology and a Director of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2007. Pickering has held multiple fellowships, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984-85), at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1986-87), and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2006-07). He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (1995) and The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010). His current work explores the ways of acting with the environment. 
 

Stefania Barca | Undoing the Anthropocene

Stefania Barca is an environmental historian who specializes on the labour/environment/gender nexus in the industrial era. A Senior Researcher at CES since 2009, where she has co-founded and coordinated the Ecology and Society Lab, she obtained her PhD in Italy (1997), and has held visiting positions at Yale University, UC Berkeley and Lund University. She is currently Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at the University of Uppsala (Sweden). She has published a number of articles in peer reviewed journals and in online magazines, some of them translated in several languages, and four books. Her book Enclosing Water. Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley (2010) was awarded the Turku Prize for best research monograph in environmental history. At our Conference, she will be presenting her latest book Forces of Reproduction. Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene (2020).
 

Gerald Taylor Aiken | Community and Climate Justice: Why orientation matters

Gerald Taylor Aiken is a Research Associate at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research and a Carson Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Durham. His current research interests focus on the role of community in the transition to low-carbon futures, particularly how community is used to understand, value, and relate to the environment.
 

Miriam Lang | Putting Buen Vivir to practice in the Ecuadorian Andes, or how to interact with modernity in dialectic and self-determined ways

Miriam Lang is an Associate Professor for Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador. She holds a PhD in Sociology and a Master’s Degree in Latin American Studies from the Free University in Berlin. She collaborates with the Latin American Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development and with internationalist, feminist, ecologist and anti-racist social movements. Her research focuses on the critique of development, systemic alternatives and the territorial implementation of Buen Vivir. She combines decolonial and feminist perspectives with political economy and political ecology. She co-edited the book Beyond Development – Alternative visions from Latin America (2013) which has been translated into 9 languages. At our Conference, she will be discussing her latest book Re-inhabiting the territory: plurinacionality, interculturality and sumak kawsay in the first indigenous municipality of Cayambe (2021).