This event is part of the RECET History and Social Sciences Festival "Green Transformations"
Venue: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1
Position of the tent: https://goo.gl/maps/8FjYQNtdnaUiKCcs6
Roundtable discussion with Knut Cordsen (Journalist), Agnieszka Pasieka (Yale University), Lisa Panhuber (Greenpeace, Wien), Antje Daniel (Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna), moderated by Alexander Schneidmesser (RECET)
From Fridays for Future to the Last Generation to Extinction Rebellion–climate activism has become a prominent feature of contemporary social mobilization, especially of the younger generation. Following in the footsteps of but also transcending the methods of earlier environmental organizations like Greenpeace, most of this activism is identified with the political left. But there is also the lesser known phenomenon of environmental mobilization on the political right. Beyond the issue of political partisanship, the question arises what climate activism can achieve: does it raise awareness for pressing environmental issues, or might it even lead to societal backlash and disinterest? Can there be “too much” activism? Will climate activists start their “long march through the institutions”? This panel brings together scholars, activists and journalists to discuss these and other issues.
Knut Cordsen, born in Kiel in 1972, attended the Deutsche Journalistenschule in Munich and studied Communication Science, Political Science and Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Since 1997, he has worked as a literary critic, cultural-political commentator and presenter in the cultural editorial department of BR and for other ARD broadcasters. In 2022, he published "Die Weltverbesserer. How much activism can our society take?" (Aufbau)
Agnieszka Pasieka is a sociocultural anthropologist, author of Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living religious difference in Catholic Poland (Palgrave 2015) and the forthcoming book Living right: far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe (Princeton UP, 2024). She worked at the University of Vienna (between 2015 and 2023), where she carried out two ethnographic projects on transnational networking of far-right social movements. Currently, she is a research fellow at Yale University.
Lisa Panhuber has been a campaigner and spokesperson for Greenpeace in Austria since 2019. Her focus topics are waste prevention and environmentally friendly production of consumer goods such as clothing, electronics, food and cosmetics. She completed a Master's degree in Socio-Ecological Economics and Policy at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Public Communications at the University of Vienna and worked in Munich, Cambodia and Vienna before joining Greenpeace.
Antje Daniel is a researcher in the field of protest and movement studies, political sociology as well as gender/intersectionality and future/utopia at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. She is also an associated researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg and at the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. In her current research, she analyzes climate and environmental movements as well as protests for social housing, education and democracy. One of her current FWF research projects, for example, analyzes youth environmental activism in Austria, Bangladesh and Uganda.
Alexander Schneidmesser studied Eastern European Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked in Israel from 2016 to 2022 as a research assistant at the International Institute for Holocaust Studies in Yad Vashem. Since 2022 he has been a PhD student at RECET, where he works on the mutual perception between Russian Germans and post-Soviet Jews in the Federal Republic of Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jannis Panagiotidis