About

In late 2023, I began a Banting postdoctoral fellowship in the department of sociology at UBC. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral fellow at York university in the department of sociology at Glendon College. I completed my PhD at the University of Victoria (2019) where I taught courses in both the department of sociology and in the interdisciplinary human dimension of climate change program. My research is in the field of the sociology of climate change, with a focus on the political economy of energy transition and decarbonization.

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My research includes three streams.

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1. Incumbent power and climate obstruction. This aspect of my research addresses organized efforts to prevent, delay, and circumvent robust action on climate change. I have focused on the economic organization and political influence of the fossil fuel sector, including via lobbying, and other corporate-state relations. Recent work develops a more fulsome account of the actors, strategies and sites of climate obstruction in Canada and beyond, includind the role of think-tank and other civil society actors. This work has been done in collaboration with the Corporate Mapping Project and the Climate Social Science Network.

2. Competing actor networks and policy discourses for sustainability transitions. I am currently investigating the construction and evolution of a 'green growth' or 'clean growth' project of climate change action in Canada. I analyze the policy-planning networks (spanning civil society, state and economy), and discourses emerging to advance the project. Broadly, I aim to provide insight into the prospects and limits of this project, which has become a predominant framework for addressing climate change.                                                                                         A related strand of my work examines environmental movements and their evolving role in Canada’s climate politics. My research explores how these movements have shifted from largely ‘defensive’ strategies—such as opposing pipelines—to more ‘offensive’ efforts to shape climate discourse and policy agendas. This shift has been accompanied by the rise of climate justice narratives, which provide a powerful frame for building alliances with labour, Indigenous communities, and other actors. In this way, I investigate both the expanding capacities and the enduring constraints that environmental movements face in contesting incumbents and advancing alternative pathways within Canada’s political economy of climate action.

3.  Fossil capitalism and ecological political economy. My dissertation, published as a monograph with Brill (Forces of Production, Climate Change and Canadian Fossil Capitalism, 2021), analyzed how fossil fuels have been embedded in production systems and how this constrains decarbonization. In this and other works, I develop the concept of “green productive forces” to highlight the potential of ecological knowledge itself, as well as associated developments in renewable energy and green infrastructure, while examining how “relations of production,” especially fossil fuel power, restricts their deployment. This work ccontributes to an ecological turn in political economy by extending historical materialism to the ecological contradictions of capitalist development and the potential for sustainability transformations.