With Rebecca Elliott, Associate Professor of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

"Towards a Sociology of Incumbency in the Face of Climate Change"

To attend online, please register here : https://forms.gle/3MUD4qecyNS8iJP7A
or at IUEM in Amphi D: free entry
 

"In the face of increasingly intense climate-related disasters, many social actors are working strenuously to keep things the same, to keep things in place. They want to insist that certain things should not and do not have to change in the face of the climate crisis. In this presentation of work-in-progress, I probe this conviction through what I am tentatively calling a sociology of “incumbency.” Incumbency captures an often-implicit commitment to preserving present arrangements of people and property, and the familiar land uses, skylines, nebulous “character” of place, routines of life, and identities those arrangements generate. Incumbency expresses the resonance of an unremarked understanding that who is there now has something like a right to stay, and that what is physically in place now is worthy of protection. I develop an analytical framework for discerning the historical, political economic, and affective dimensions of incumbency on the basis of a census of climate change adaptation infrastructure projects in the coastal United States, as well as a detailed case study of a planned seawall in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. This climate change adaptation infrastructure both makes and expresses incumbency’s possibility."

Dr Rebecca Elliott  joined the London School of Economics in 2016 after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests span economic sociology, political sociology, environmental sociology, and knowledge production and science studies.

At the LSE, she is a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and at the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation. She is a Faculty Affiliate of the LSE Phelan United States Centre.

She is one of four Editors of the British Journal of Sociology.

Her work has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, and Phi Beta Kappa and has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Webpage of the seminars Ocean & Societies : https://www.umr-amure.fr/seminaires-ocean-societes/