Director, Centre for Research in Economic Sociology & Innovation

The Sociogenesis of Climate Change & Finitudes of Earth’s Resources: the China-Brazil connection

Professor Mark Harvey,

Director, Centre for Research in Economic Sociology & Innovation

(CRESI), University of Essex

Wednesday 24 June 2015

Room 10.05, Harold Hankins Building

4.00 – 5.30 pm (Coffee from 3.45 pm)

Abstract

This seminar presents the core ideas of Mark Harvey’s current ESRC Professional Fellowship Research on the food-energy climate change trilemma. The concept of the sociogenesis of climate change will be elaborated in terms of how different political economics interact with their own environmental resource constraints of land, water and energy. The emerging geopolitical dynamic between Brazil and China serves to illustrate the necessity for social science to analyse such interactions as a major source of historical and societal variation.

These countries’ distinctive political regimes with different developmental trajectories are significantly conditioned by sharply contrasting environmental resources of land, water, solar and fossil energy. Developing his neo-Polanyian approach the argument will be made for a social science understanding of ‘the shifting place of the economy in nature’ in the political shaping of economies manifest in the sociogenesis of and responses to, climate change.

Biography

Professor Mark Harvey, Director of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESI) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. His recent books include ‘Exploring the Tomato: transformations of nature, economy and society’; ‘Trust in Food: A comparative institutional analysis’; Public or Private Economies of Knowledge: Turbulence in the Biological Sciences’; ‘Karl Polanyi: New perspectives on the place of the economy in society’ and ‘Markets, Rules and institutions of Exchange’.

He collaborated in the SCI-led ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group, researching the provisioning and consumption of drinking water in Europe, India, Mexico and Taiwan. He currently holds an ESRC Professional Research Fellowship leading a project on ‘The food-energy-climate change trilemma’ running until 2017.

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