Corporate power • fossil capital • climate crisis
A three-week-long course open to social science graduate students from across Canada
May 10-28, 2021 • University of Victoria
Thank you for your interest in the Third CMP Summer Institute. Pre-registrations are now closed.
Join us for the Corporate Mapping Project’s third summer institute, offered by the University of Victoria Department of Sociology.
The course is open to graduate students in social science disciplines at any Canadian university (for students at universities participating in the Western Deans Agreement, the course may be eligible for transfer credit).
This three week-long graduate seminar combines the sociology of corporate power with the political economy of fossil capital and the political ecology of the climate crisis. The Institute will focus extensively on the search for solutions, beyond business-as-usual, to the deepening climate crisis.
Our work in the course will centre to some extent upon the case of Canada, but will extend to other national cases and to the transnational level. Topics will include:
- the sociology, political economy and political ecology of fossil capitalism and carbon democracy as a distinct way of life reliant upon colonial and extractivist relations, and now in global crisis;
- modalities of corporate power in this field, including control over labour processes of extraction, transport and refining; networks of capital ownership and governance; practices and discourses of corporate hegemony in civil society, media and state; carbon commodity chains and popular resistance at flashpoints along them; and
- a survey of sociopolitical developments that could prefigure or forestall what John Urry has termed societies beyond oil, and what others have called a just transition to energy democracy, promoting climate justice.
The course will be directed by Dr. William Carroll, but will feature presentations, guest lectures and extensive participation from members of the Corporate Mapping Project network, including representatives from environmental, social justice, labour and First Nations groups.
The Summer Institute will be delivered entirely online.
Space is limited and students who want to take the course for credits will have priority.
