ICRR Seminar: Prof. Daniel Nyberg

Please join us for the upcoming ICRR Seminar commencing at 10:30am, followed by light refreshments at 11:30am.

Title: Contesting the Future: Utopian politics and the defence of fossil fuel hegemony

Abstract: Despite national and corporate commitments to carbon neutrality, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, causing worsening climate change impacts. Within this context, climate protesters around the world are demanding a different future. In this paper, we are interested in how the fossil fuel industry and its political supporters have responded to these challenges and maintained fossil fuel hegemony. Based on interviews with influential informants from the political, lobbying and fossil fuel sectors as well as texts from media, speeches and press releases, our analysis shows how hegemony is defended by critiquing protesters’ imaginaries as utopian (impossible) or dystopian (undesirable) and by constructing a conservative counter-utopia that is linked to the status quo of fossil fuel dominance. The findings explain how utopian politics is employed to defend hegemony by i) spatially fragmenting opponents and incorporating protesters’ future imaginaries within a conservative counter-utopia, and ii) temporally constructing a pathway from the status quo to this conservative counter-utopia. Our discussion of utopian politics contributes to the literature on imaginaries by understanding how constructed futures are politically navigated, and to discussions on hegemony by explaining the expansive (spatially and temporally) discursive strategies of maintaining hegemony. We conclude by arguing for the importance of utopian thinking in addressing climate change.

Bio: Daniel Nyberg is Professor of Sustainability at the University of Queensland and Guest Professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden. His research explores responses to climate change in projects on the transition to a low carbon economy, the politics of adaptation, and how corporate political activities influence public policy. He has published widely on these topics in journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Theory. His most recent co-authored book is Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation and Suffering (Cambridge University Press).