Afternoon schedule

Room J210, 13 rue de l'Université (75007 Paris)

- 12.30-14:30: AIRE seminar "Cultural horizons for radical abundance with degrowth" with Susan Paulson (University of Florida, Visiting at CRIS)

- 14:45-16:45 : Presentation of their master thesis by candidates shortlisted for the AIRE Award for Environmental Student Research

12:30-14:30 : Seminar

Cultural horizons for radical abundance with degrowth

With Susan Paulson, Professor at University of Florida, Guest Professor at CRIS, Sciences Po, Paris

By celebrating the formidable creativity of human organization across cultures and through millennia, this seminar aims to broaden horizons for responses to ecological crises. A surge of policies and technologies have been applied to make economies grow spectacularly -- in ways that disrupt the earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, and that degrade vulnerable people and places. 

While environmental concerns are now impelling innovations designed to increase sustainability, their transformative potential is limited without civilizational moves away from sustaining growth, and toward sustaining modes of abundance that enhance ecosocial wellbeing while using less material and energy. Decroissance pioneer Serge Latouche has long encouraged those of us associated with so-called “superior” sciences, languages, and institutions to prioritize decolonizing our own imaginaries. Yet, sustainability studies and policies continue to be constrained by narrow cultural scope and shallow historical depth, striving toward myopic goals of maintaining currently-dominant economies and lifeways without compromising future generations’ enjoyment of the same. Anthropological insights can nourish paths to decolonize, depatriarchize, deracialize, decommodify, and degrow our societies.

Speaker : 

Susan Paulson serves as Professor at University of Florida and is currently Guest Professor at Sciences Po, Paris. Decades of field research on human-environment relations in Andean and Amazonian communities inform Paulson‘s current work toward global environmental justice. She learns with diverse interlocutors in forums ranging from indigenous workshops to executive summits, and in outlets from Degrowth.info to The Economist. Recent publications include World-making technology entangled with coloniality, racialization, and gender (2024), Degrowth and Anthropology (2024), Economics of abundance with degrowth (2023), and the co-authored book The Case for Degrowth (2020), translated into ten languages.

Coffee break

14:45-16:45 : AIRE Award for Environmental Student Research - Presentation of the five shortlisted students

• 14:45-15:05 : Joséphine BERTOUX, ""We want more green, but...": Protesting urban greening in Paris" (Research School, Master in sociology)
• 15:10-15:30 : Susanne DE JONG, "The EU Strategic Partnerships for Critical Raw Materials with Emerging and Developing Economies - A True Promise of Local Value Creation?" (PSIA, Master in Environmental Policy)
• 15:35-15:55 : Berta FLORES ARICO, "The agents of wind : Gender perspectives on the green energy transition. An ethnography in La Guajira" (PSIA, Master in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action)
• 16:00-16:20 : Julia KIELOCH, "Energy transition for whom? Examining the distribution of green subsidy schemes in Poland" (EAP, Master in Public Policy)
• 16:25-16:45 : Paul SERVAIS, "The energy transition in rural France: powering the radical right ?" (Urban School, Master in Governing ecological transitions in cities)