KTH Logo

Open Access to Sport, Performance and Sustainability

Is the strive for increasing performance and an ever-growing sports sector compatible with sustainable development? This is the key issue that the authors investigates in a new book: Sport, Performance and Sustainability, edited by Daniel Svensson, Erik Backman, Susanna Hedenborg and the Division’s Sverker Sörlin.

Sport, Performance and Sustainability examines the logic of “faster higher, and stronger” and the technoscientific revolution that has driven tremendous growth in the sports economy and in sport performance over the last 100 years.

The chapters provide valuable perspectives on the tensions between performance and sustainability. Co-authors include Sigmund Loland, Simon Beames, Itai Danielski, Andreas Isgren Karlsson, Jack Reed, Johan Carlsson, Isak Lidström, Bo Carlsson and Marie Larneby.

Sport, performance and Sustainability is publisehd by Routledge and written within MISTRA Sport and Outdoor – a research and collaboration programme to generate knowledge and solutions for increased sustainability in sport and outdoor recreation.

The book is due for printing now in May, but is also available open access online. Find it here: Sport, Performance and Sustainability

The Editors

Daniel Svensson is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at the Department of Sport Sciences. He defended at the Division in 2016 with the thesis “Scientizing performance in endurance sports : The emergence of ‘rational training’ in cross-country skiing, 1930-1980,”.

Erik Backman is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy and Sport Sciences at the Department of Sport Sciences, School of Health and Welfare, Dalarna University, Sweden, and Associate Professor at the Department of Primary and Secondary Teacher Education, Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.

Susanna Hedenborg is a Professor in Sport Sciences at Malmö University, Sweden, and the President of the Swedish Research Council for Sport Science.

Sverker Sörlin is a Professor of Environmental History at the Division  and a co-founder of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory.

 

New Book! Solar Technology and Global Environmental Justice by Andreas Roos

Andreas Roos, researcher at the Division and the EHL, active in the Harnessing the Heat Below our Feet-Project, has published a new book on 02 February 2023.

 

https://images.routledge.com/common/jackets/amazon/978103227/9781032273389.jpg

Abstract

Building on insights from ecological economics and philosophy of technology, this book offers a novel, interdisciplinary approach to understand the contradictory nature of Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective option in the world economy. However, reports about miserable working conditions, environmentally deleterious mineral extraction and toxic waste dumps corrode the image of a problem-free future based on solar power. Against this backdrop, Andreas Roos explores whether ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ – an asymmetric transfer of labour time and natural resources – is a necessary condition for solar PV development. He demonstrates how the massive increase in solar PV installation over recent years would not have been possible without significant wage/price differences in the world economy – notably between Europe/North America and Asia- and concludes that solar PV development is currently contingent on environmental injustices in the world economy. As a solution, Roos argues that solar technology is best coupled with strategies for degrowth, which allow for a transition away from fossil fuels and towards a socially just and ecologically sustainable future.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of solar power, philosophy of technology, and environmental justice.

Profilbild av Andreas Roos

About the Author

Andreas Roos is an interdisciplinary scholar with a doctoral degree in the field of human ecology. His work draws from ecological economics, environmental history and philosophy of technology to understand the contentious relation between technology and ecology. Roos’s most recent work focuses on assessing the potential of renewable energy technologies to transform modern human-environmental relations. Publishing in top ranking journals, Roos’s other contributions include ecological perspectives on the digital economy and the possibilities for commons-based energy technology.

Save the Date: The EHL becomes a KTH centre!

Join us for a joyous celebration of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory’s past decade of activities and the launch of its new start as a KTH centre. The afternoon will consist of recapping the many activities of the EHL since its start in 2011/2012 under the leadership of Director Marco Armiero (“Wasteocene“) and hosting a roundtable on the purpose, importance, and future of environmental humanities research, in Sweden, Europe, and worldwide.

If you are interested who was involved during the last decade in the EHL’s activities, check out this list.

Join us for an afternoon of reflections, sharing, and discussions, followed by a mingle. Mark your calendars!

Time & Place

Thursday 2023-01-26 15.00 – 19.00 (Stockholm time)

Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment Teknikringen 74D, plan 5
S-11428 Stockholm

Marco Armiero: Mediterranean Culture Award 2022 with “Wasteocene”

We are happy to announce that Marco Armiero, director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, has been awarded the Mediterranean Culture Award 2022 in the section for Human Sciences with the book Wasteocene – Stories from the global dump. He recieved the award at a price ceremony in Cosenza, Italy, on the 13th of October.

This year it was the XVI edition of the Mediterranean Culture Award founded by the Carcial Foundation. The foundation represents the historical continuation of the Cassa di Risparmio di Calabria, established in Cosenza in 1861. Marco Armiero was nominated in the Human Sciences section together with emeritus professor of economy, Joan Martínez Alier and political scienteist Gille Kepel. His book Wasteocene – Stories from the global dump was published in 2021.

Summary of the book

Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities implies the construction of toxic ecologies made of contaminating substances and narratives. While official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narrative has been written in flesh, blood, and cells. Traveling between Naples (Italy) and Agbogbloshie (Ghana), science fiction and epidemic outbreaks, this element will take the readers into the bowels of the Wasteocene, but it will also indicate the commoning practices which are dismantling it.

Get the book here!

*

Also recently published by Marco:

Armiero, Marco/ Biasillo, Roberta/ Graf von Hardenberg, Wilko: Mussolini’s Nature. An environmental History of Italian Fascism, MIT Press 2022.

Ruiz Cayuela, Sergio a. Armiero, Marco: Cooking Commoning Subjectivities. Guerilla Narrative in the Cooperation Birmingham Solidarity Kitchen, in: Franklin, Alex (ed.): Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship. Transformative Methods in Social Sustainability Research, Palgrave Macmillan 2022.

Armiero, Marco: From Waste to Climate. Tackling Climate Change in a Rebel City, in: Social Text (2022), 40 (1(150)): 69-89.

 

Upcoming: Rob Nixon at the 11th Stockholm Archipelago Lecture

We are happy to announce that the next Stockholm Archipelago Lecture is coming up on 10 November 2022 at 5pm (Stockholm time). Rob Nixon is going to give his presentation titled “The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life”. Feel free to join digitally! You find the link below.

Abstract:

Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? Since the great recession of 2008, we have witnessed an upsurge in public science  writing that has popularized research into forest sentience, forest  suffering and the forest as collective intelligence.

This talk roots the current appeal of forest communication in a  widespread discontent with neoliberalism’s antipathy to cooperative  ways of being. Nixon argues that the science of forest dynamics  offers a counter-narrative of flourishing, an allegory for what George Monbiot has called “private sufficiency and public wealth.

*

Rob NixonRob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.

Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, Orion, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere.

Environmental justice struggles in the global South are central to Nixon’s work. He is a particularly fascinated by the animating role that artists can play in relation to social movements.

*

Time: Thu 2022-11-10 17.00

Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5IsceytpjIuE9YU6W7DCSPNCcIq2zam9Dhd

Language: English

Lecturer: Rob Nixon

New article: Out of steam? A social science and humanities research agenda for geothermal energy

Andreas Roos, researcher at the Division and the EHL, active in the Harnessing the heat below our feets project, newly published an open access article together with Rozanne C. Spijkerboera, Ethemcan Turhana, Marco Billi, SofiaVargas-Payera, Jose Opazo and Marco Armiero in the paper Energy Research & Social Science. Read the abstarct below and follow the link for full text.
Photo by Punyashree Venkatram on Unsplash

Abstract

The potential of geothermal energy for energy transition is increasingly recognized by governments around the world. Whether geothermal energy is a sustainable source of heat and/or electricity depends on how it is deployed in specific contexts. Therefore, it is striking that there is only limited attention to geothermal energy from a social science and humanities (SSH) perspective. Geothermal energy is largely conceptualized as a technological and/or geological issue in both science and practice. This perspective article aims to go beyond such conceptualizations by positioning social science research as an important lens to explore the promises and pitfalls of geothermal energy. We first provide an overview of the current state of geothermal energy as a decarbonization strategy. Second, we move on to review the existing literature. This review shows that studies that do address geothermal energy from an SSH perspective tend to be of a descriptive nature and lack analytical diversity. Third, we discuss three complementary theoretical approaches that are used in the social sciences to observe and address other forms of energy and energy transition. We believe that socio-technical assemblages, systems, and imaginaries can provide fruitful analytical lenses to study the promises, pitfalls and spatialization of geothermal energy. We conclude the paper with a research agenda and call for further engagement with this topic in SSH research, with attention to specificities of global South and North contexts.

Keywords

Assemblage
Socio-technical systems
Imaginaries
Infrastructures
Narratives
Geothermal

Read the full article, open access: Out of steam? A social science and humanities research agenda for geothermal energy

What is Deep Sea Mining?

What is Deep Sea Mining? will start up the festival this year. The five episodes are screened at a brownbag seminar and followed by a discussion lead by the Divison’s Tirza Myer. In the panel we have Robert Blasiak, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (focuses on the sustainable management of ocean resources, and ocean stewardship) and Staffan Lindberg, author and journalist at Swedish paper Aftonbladet (focuses on foreign and climate news).

The What is Deep Sea Mining? project was developed in collaboration with Margarida Mendes, curator, educator and activist from Lisbon, Portugal. Margardia is a founding member of Oceano Livre, the environmental movement against deep sea mining. She is dedicated to understand how a shifting climate impacts society’s capacity for imagination. We will also show a recording of Margarida during this event.

Go here for the full program with more information on this session and to register: https://crosscuts.se/program-2022/ 

Ecopoetry for Just Futures: Transcultural Poetic Practices in the Anthropocenes

The Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University and the Rizoma platform are inviting everyone to an Open Lecture. There, our division’s postdoctoral researcher Nuno Da Silva Marques, affiliated with the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, is going to talk about and discuss the transcultural role of ecopoetry. Ecopoetry is a genre for peace, sustainability and ecology with deep roots in Latin American culture. Apart from Nuno, Swedish poet Jonas Gren and Argentinian poet Gisela Heffes join the debate.

The lecture takes place on 28 April 2022 from 6 to 8pm (Stockholm time). Participation is possible both on-site at the Library of the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University and online through the registration form available here.

Abstract of the event (original here)

Latin America has a robust tradition of ecopoetry featuring the work of world-renown poets as Nicanor Parra, Homero Aridjis, Esthela Calderón, among many others. Since the emergence in the 60s, this poetry has renovated the lyrical expression to mourn the vanishing of ecosystems, to propose ways to connect to the environment beyond neoliberal ideologies, and to push for environmental legislation in the region, “to fight for an e-constitution” as the ecopoem by Parra goes. Ecopoetry constitutes a kind of environmental knowledge that registers the ecological crisis contributing embodied and situated ways to relate to the planet. As a literary practice, ecopoetry revisits cultural imaginaries of nature to foster an ethics of care that traverses national and linguistic barriers. This open lecture will feature poetry readings in a transcultural and translingual perspective from Argentina-USA (Gisela Heffes), Sweden (Jonas Gren) and Portugal (Nuno Marques). The readings will be framed by discussions prompted by the moderator (Azucena Castro) to highlight ecopoetry as a kind of expression that connects environmental, cultural, biological, technological and political concerns. Attention will be paid to how ecopoetry assembles word and world, art and science, human and nonhuman to portray diverse Anthropocenes in ways attentive to situated and local experiences. At a time of accelerated species extinction, social instability and climate change, this open lecture will consider what role can (eco)poetry play as a cultural phenomenon, an epistemology and a critical practice to reweave ourselves to others and the planet.

Critiques and Practices of Sustainability – Spring Course for Doctoral Students and Postdoctors

Critiques and Practices of Sustainability:
Environmental Humanities Perspectives on Chilean and Swedish Ecocultures of Water, Land, and Air is 7,5 credit course, established by Division postdoc Nuno Marques, among others. Facing global contemporary environmental challenges and the need to imagine sustainable ways of relating to the environment (outlined by the SDGs), this course analyzes forms of connection with the environment elaborated in ecopoetry, ecofiction and ecocinema from Chile and Sweden. This course will address critiques and practices of sustainability from an environmental humanities perspective combining ecocriticism, cultural studies, sustainability studies, and decolonial theories and practices.

Learning outcomes:

  • identify, understand, and critically and creatively apply concepts such as sustainability, environmental justice, slow violence, sacrifice zones, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, deep time.
  • assess how cultural products and expressions (visual and literary) from Chile and Sweden relate to global environmental concerns, propose situated forms of connection to the biosphere, and how they intervene in environmental discourses.

Practical information

The course entails 5 weeks of synchronous and asynchronous work through Zoom and Canvas. It comprises 5 units: a theoretical and methodological introduction; three thematic blocks dealing with life below water, life on land, and life on air, through the lens of sustainability in cultural productions from Chile and Sweden mainly from the twentieth century to contemporary works in 2021; and a concluding interdisciplinary colloquium with invited discussants.

Read more about the course and how to apply on the course page: Critiques and Practices of Sustainability

”Två fel gör inte ett rätt” – How China is taken as an argument to not act for the climate

Nina Wormbs, Professor of History of Technology at the division, has published an article relevant in the context of the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 17 November 2021. In the following we will present a short summary of its main points in English, while you can read the original in full length and in Swedish here.

Profilbild av Nina Cyrén Wormbs

Summary:

When climate issues are discussed in Sweden, China is often taken as a comparison. In fact, people use China as an argument to not act in regard to climate change.

During the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, the focus was also on China, since the country is highly invested in coal both at home and abroad. It is obvious that we need to work with China together, since its emissions are enormous. Despite this, China has recently undertaken steps towards a sustainable society.

In particular, it has become normal to point to China in a debate, if one does not want to engage with those questions the current climate crisis is bringing up. This can include coal power plants but also a justification for flying to Mallorca or Thailand for fun, because Chinese tourists could be seen in Gamla Stan. In order for this practice not to spread further, we have to understand why those arguments are not valid and what they result in.

First, it makes no sense to motivate one’s own harm-doing by arguing that someone else would produce even more harm.

Secondly, the comparison with China’s emissions are an eternal but nevertheless problematic way of relativising one’s own influence. Because you are always able to find someone who produces more emissions than yourself. More than Sweden. More than Europe. Of course it is important how much we emit as humanity, but the China-argument suggests that there would be some form of give- and take, like as if life would be a zero-sum-game. Instead, it is the opposite: every ton of CO2 counts.

Additionally, the China-argument points to an understanding, in which one does not have to do a tiny bit of right, while someone else does so much wrong. Maybe this argument is spreading, because more and more people repeat it. People in Sweden have limited knowledge of China. China is bigger, has more people, and all of them are striving towards a better life. That’s why it might be easy to point to China, in order to relativise one’s own responsibility.

Thirdly, China is often portrayed as an enemy in Swedish media. It can therefore be seen as a nation different from Sweden, being imagined like the negative “other”.

Why are the USA never mentioned in this context, despite their higher historical and per-capita-emissions (IPCC and carbonbrief.org)? Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also hardly ever named, even though they are leading the per-capita-emissions statistics.

If one looks into the emissions of production chains of consumer goods, of which a lot are produced in China but used somewhere else like in Sweden, the territorial basis for emission-calculations seems off.

Furthermore, within most individual nations the gap between rich and poor gets bigger, which means that the individual emissions are not what the average suggests, but rather high if you are rich, or low if you are poor. Therefore, it would be a great idea to change the focus from nations to individuals, like Chancel and Piketty suggested in 2015.  This makes even more sense, since the richest 10% of the world’s population accounted for 50% of emissions since 1990. Those 10% can be found in every country, but they are not evenly distributed. More so, since 40% of those live in the USA, while only 10% live in China. It might be a cold shower for a Swedish discussant that every Swede with a monthly income of over 27,500 SEK belongs to this group.

This is not being written to support China’s climate policies. Instead, it is to show that China is not relevant if one wants to discuss a domestic climate action plan, as the relationship between being rich and producing lots of emissions is evident – and Sweden is one of the richest countries on earth.