Birkbeck Climate Festival 2025: PhD Spotlights: Research for a Sustainable Future
When:
—
Venue:
Online
As part of the Birkbeck Climate Festival 2025, this event brings together PhD students from across disciplines, across the college and beyond to showcase their research on environment and sustainability. Each speaker will give a short, engaging 5–10 minute talk, offering insights into their cutting-edge work—covering topics such as climate resilience, renewable energy, conservation, environmental policy, and more. This session is a collaboration between Birkbeck, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London, with speakers representing both institutions.
Confirmed Speakers:
🌿 Shani Cadwallender (Birkbeck) – Trees Revisited: Exploring the Nature of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Arboreal Poetry
This creative-critical project examines how trees shape identity, literary tradition, and ecological thought in nineteenth-century poetry. Engaging with the works of Toru Dutt, Elia Cook, and Amy Levy, Cadwallender interweaves critical analysis with creative components she calls dendrologies, reimagining poetic anthologies through a botanical lens. (AHRC-CHASE funded)
🌿 Pooja Kini (Birkbeck) - Climate Change in Urban India: Intersectional and Intergenerational Gendered Experiences of Water Stress (funded through the Mark James Studentship).
Growing evidence shows that the impact of climate change perpetuates inequalities based on factors such as gender, caste, and class, thereby restricting access to natural resources, education, and livelihood. My research explores how diversely situated women experience varied practices around water stress everyday in informal settlements of urban India. My findings emerge from yearlong data collection in three study settlements during 2023-24 using qualitative methods for this study, which was conducted in Jaipur, north-west India, a city facing extremely high groundwater exploitation. An essential contribution of my research is focusing on a secondary city in India since most urban academic research based in the country focuses on mega-cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, overlooking the situation faced by ordinary cities. I present a comparative case study analysis to highlight important findings from my research, specifically the intersectional, gendered, emotional, and embodied aspects of water infrastructure. My research contributes to debates around climate change adaptation policies on water and builds on feminist knowledge in urban spaces within human geography.
🌿Olivia Allison (Birkbeck) – Re-membering Ammonia’s Past, Present and Future Disasters
Ammonia (NH₃) is a toxic gas with a paradoxical role as both a fertiliser and an explosive. This creative-critical project explores the contradictions of ammonia’s history and future—examining how its disasters, both fast (explosions, leaks) and slow (pollution, administrative violence), shape the human and non-human world. Drawing on archival materials, found texts, and interviews, this innovative hybrid text analyses and re-members ammonia’s affective and material impact on our world.
🌿 Kae Rose (Birkbeck) - Urban Solarpunk: Restor(y)ing the Postcolonial City (AHRC-CHASE funded)
Propelled by recent developments in the environmental and energy humanities, and adopting a postcolonial and intersectional approach, this thesis asks whether an emerging science-fiction sub-genre known as solarpunk can offer design frameworks for sustainable, equitable urban futures, using London as a case study. My investigation will include analysis of selected solarpunk short stories with transnational urban settings, alongside recent London- based fiction, poetry and eco-activism with a utopian inflection. I compare these contemporary developments of the 2010s-20s to canonical eco-fiction of the 1970s-80s. The thesis will argue that attention to a diverse, inclusive range of speculative narratives and storyworlds is essential to the equitable progression of environmentalist movements.
🌿Angie Hsu (RHUL) Safeguarding Planetary Health and Restoring Tropical Forests through Radical Listening
Drawing inspiration from my field study in Indonesian Borneo with two award-winning NGOs, Health in Harmony and Alam Sehat Lestari, this presentation introduces the methodology of 'radical listening,' a community engagement approach first developed by Dr. Kinari Webb. Radical listening entails listening to the voices of the oppressed, particularly those systematically silenced by colonial power structures, including both human and non-human communities. By prioritizing empathy, interconnection, and reciprocity, radical listening fosters transformative solutions that address both environmental and social injustices. This approach cultivates mutual respect, empowers marginalized communities, and supports the restoration of tropical forest ecosystems and human well-being, ultimately contributing to the creation of a more just and sustainable future.
This is a unique opportunity to hear from emerging scholars across a range of disciplines, exploring the ways literature, history, and environmental studies intersect with sustainability and climate research. Whether you're a student, researcher, or simply curious about the latest developments in sustainability, join us for an evening of thought-provoking discussions and fresh perspectives.
Contact name:
Stephen Willey