About the talk:

This talk argues for understanding climate change as a form of macro-social change and analyzes it as such. While it is commonly argued that sociology is not well-suited for understanding climate change due to its neglect of the natural world, I argue that sociology is, in other ways, uniquely well-positioned to understand it—due to its historical and contemporary orientation toward grasping social change of this magnitude. With a focus on the material, ecological, social, and spatial relationships created by industrial urbanization, and particularly the city-hinterland relationship as related to infrastructure development in the American West, I make two main arguments. First, that many of the specific infrastructural systems that climate change requires transforming are direct legacies of a comparably transformative moment of social life that classical sociologists strove to understand while still nascent. Second, that climate transitions are opportunities to break from or continue those well-established patterns. Specifically, I show how the pursuit of sustainable cities, renewable energy, and green extraction clearly reflect (and have the potential to destabilize) the shape, epistemology, and political economy of what Craig Calhoun has called “the infrastructure of modernity” and the sociospatial and socioecological relations it maintained. Finally, I draw on critiques from post- and decolonial sociology to caution against reproducing the developmentalism and lack of relationality that plagued the macro-historical tradition in contemporary sociological analyses of climate change, particularly given the persistence of these tropes in media and public discussion.

About the speaker:

Hillary Angelo is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is Founding Director of UCSC’s Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies and was a Member in the Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2022-2023. Her work offers a social-theoretical perspective on socio-ecological questions through historical and contemporary research on urban greening, sustainability planning and policy, infrastructure, and climate change. She has published widely in leading journals in sociology, geography, and urban studies, and her first book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens, was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently writing a book on the American West’s 610 million acres of public lands, which are key sites for climate adaptation and flashpoints of 21st century political conflict.