Designing the Just Transition - Design Politics, Labor and the Battle for Post Carbon Futures
Damian White
Dear Colleagues,
I’m excited to let you know that after six years of research, our new book Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures will be published by Bloomsbury today.
You can read the preface and intro on google books here: https://books.google.com/books?id=8N_cEQAAQBAJ&pg=PT6&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=false
It’s already received some wonderful endorsements:
“..a major intervention—one that will reshape debates across political ecology, urbanism, environmental humanities, architecture, planning, and critical design theory.” Neil Brenner, Urban Theory Lab, Lucy Flowers Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago
“a rare gift of a book: at once richly historical and yet compellingly pertinent to today’s predicaments.. path-breaking and deeply relevant across many disciplines” Jesse Adams Stein, Director of Design Studies, University of Technology Sydney
"This fascinating book treats the transition ahead with the nuance and complexity it deserves, but also the brio and confidence it demands. Read it and then go make it real." Bill McKibben.
“This book …genuinely opens new ground for the discipline." Elisa Iturbe, Assistant Professor of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University.
"These are tough times for positive, forward-looking social and environmental visioning. But Damian White and Nicholas Pevzner unflinchingly embody hope for a better future, while giving us theoretical and historical richness and piercing critique where it's long been overdue. Colleagues and comrades: read this one." Timmons Roberts, Professor of Environment and Society, Brown University
" Designing the Just Transition applies the theoretical and practical promise of the strategy to the political economy of design while keeping it grounded, intentionally and creatively, in the world of work and workers." Dimitris Stevis, Professor of Political Science, Colorado State University and author of Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation.
“A counter-argument against disillusionment in the face of the many challenges facing a field in crisis and a world in transition…”Ahmed Ansari, Associate Professor, Integrated Design & Media, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University
“I have waited for this book. Pulling together as it does the particulars of labor/ecology relations while taking to task the design professions’ historical complicity with neo-liberalism, it uniquely offers a set of tactics for building a worker-forward transition to a healthy life on this planet.” Peggy Deamer, Professor of Architecture Yale University
"Our societies need massive and rapid transitions. White and Pevzner provide three badly missing things to that challenge. They bring labor politics to the practice of transition design, design to talk of just transitions, and critical histories to visioning more sustainable future societies. Designing the Just Transition will remind systems change oriented designers that their agency lies in acknowledging that they also are laborers who must act in solidarity across scales." Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies, University of Technology Sydney
You can get an exam copy of the book from Bloomsbury here:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/discover/bloomsbury-academic/instructors-students/exam-copies/
Happy to give class talks on the book if there’s interest.
All the best,
Damian White
Damian F. White
Professor of Social Theory and Environmental Studies;
Rhode Island School of Design
20 Washington Place, Providence, RI 02903. USA
he/him/his
https://www.risd.edu/academics/history-philosophy-and-social-sciences/faculty/damian-white