Starting in the Spring term 2025, FEKIS is organising a new PhD course that invites to broaden our discipline’s view on the complex issues that we today encounter under names such as global sustainability challenges, the Anthropocene or the polycrisis. Currently, the different aspects of sustainability have become common for the disciplines such as management studies, economics, and finance. However, the knowledge base underpinning what sustainability is assumed to be, or how it is to be achieved, is often narrow and based on a simplified interpretation of natural
sciences.
The course will cover topics that, on the one hand, address key points of criticism of the current Western mainstream approaches to sustainability, and on the other hand, present several alternative theoretical and conceptual perspectives on these issues that originate from disciplines such as environmental humanities, political economy, ecological economics, and science and technology studies. The course will consist of the following six blocks:
1) The origin of the Anthropocene and its critiques
2) Power dynamics and the politics of delay and obstruction
3) Carbon accounting, and commensuration
2) Power dynamics and the politics of delay and obstruction
3) Carbon accounting, and commensuration
4) Anthropocentrism and colonialism
5) Petrocultures
6) Not-for-profit, degrowth, and values pluralism.
The purpose of the course it to critically discuss, understand and test applying these perspectives in the PhD students’ own research.
We welcome applications and expressions of interest from PhD students in business administration, management, economics and related disciplines who pursue sustainability topics in their PhD projects or are interested to develop in this direction.
Based at Södertörn university, this is a hybrid course that will consist of two full-day meetings in Stockholm in April and at Linnaeus University in Kalmar in October in connection with the next FEKIS conference, with five online seminars in between.
While the course is free of charge, participants will need to cover their own costs for travelling to the two physical meetings. Svetlana Gross (svetlana.gross@hhs.se) has the main responsibility for coordinating the course, and Prof. Peter Dobers (peter.dobers@sh.se) is the examiner.
If you have any questions about the course, please get in touch with Svetlana. Likewise, to express interest in applying to the course, please send a short (maximum 1 page) motivation letter to svetlana.gross@hhs.se no later than January 31, 2025. Notification of acceptance will be given by February 10, 2025.
Planned occasions:
10 April, 10:00-16:00, Södertörn University in Stockholm
22 April, 13:00-15:30 on Zoom
6 May, 13:00-15:30 on Zoom
20 May, 13:00-15:30 on Zoom
26 August, 13:00-15:30 on Zoom
9 September, 13:00-15:30 on Zoom
14 October, 10:00-16:00, Linnaeus University in Kalmar