DH-Lunch: How to Uncover Ties Between the Fossil Fuel Industry and Academia
In this DH lunch lecture, you'll hear about how fossil footprints shape academia – from institutional structures to research practices – and why a critical understanding of this is crucial for the future of knowledge production.
Fossil fuel companies use universities to recruit, conduct research in their business interests, and give legitimacy to their marketing. Besides overt greenwashing, their involvement can shape students' and schoolchildren's worldviews in more subtle ways, silences critical voices, and skews the body of research towards technology favourable for fossil-fuel business models. How can we expose and examine the involvement of the fossil-fuel industry in higher education and research?
Working in decentralised coalitions and using methods straddling investigative journalism, citizen science, and academia, Solid Sustainability Research has been researching academic-fossil ties in the Netherlands, UK, and (recently) in Norway together with the Climate Accountability Lab at University of Miami. In this talk we will demonstrate our research methodology and how those interested in investigating academic ties can go about it effectively.
About the lecturer
Aaron Pereira (external link) is associated with Solid Sustainability Research (external link) - an action-oriented research bureau focussing on climate obstruction and climate justice. For the past 3 years they have been studying the involvement of the fossil fuel industry in academia. Browse their interactive report on Dutch academia and other recent work on their website.