The Centre for Organization and Time (COT, IOA) invites to a conversation @bout time on:

Capturing Futures:
Temporality in the Drama of Environmental Politics

With Dr. Jeroen Oomen, Assistant Professor at the Urban Futures Studio at Utrecht University

Abstract
Over the past 50 years, environmental politics has operated based on the premise of a vulnerable planet, an interconnected system to be addressed using technocratic expertise (Allan, 2017a, 2017b; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016; Corry, 2013; Edwards, 2010). In this conception, the future consistently features consistently as a warning. Prophecies of doom, of imagined and expected degradation, act as the primary motivator for a politics of environmental transformation. This is not just a rhetorical theme but also an epistemic configuration that structures environmental politics – from the Limits to Growth report to the more recent ‘planetary boundaries’ concept. It has animated both the discourse and the dramaturgical regime of environmental politics. This approach has proved able to put environmental concerns on the political agenda, yet such an image of the future cannot stimulate the aspirational politics necessary for the major cultural shifts necessitated by the environmental crises. In this seminar, I think through the temporal aspects of environmental politics, based on excerpts from a current book project with Prof. Maarten Hajer. Specifically, I address the political effects of different temporalities, arguing that dramaturgical regime of environmental politics conditions particular temporalities while organising other views out.

Brief Biography

Jeroen Oomen is assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio, within the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the social, cultural, and scientific practices that create societies' conceptions of the future. His main research interests are climate politics, geoengineering, and social theory, specifically where it concerns questions of sustainability. In 2021, he published the book Imagining Climate engineering: Dreaming of the Designer Climate, on the history and sociology of climate engineering as a proposed approach to climate change.