CESSS - Center for Environmental and Sustainability Social Science
About
Environment information
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Environmental and climate problems pose serious challenges to contemporary society. Scientific research and policy institutions, such as the United Nations, have emphasized the need for social change and sustainable transformation. Social science research contributes to this movement with crucial knowledge and expertise necessary for the transformation of society towards a sustainable future.
The Center for Environmental and Sustainability Social Science (CESSS) constitutes a platform that brings together and creates synergies between environmental and sustainability researchers within sociology, psychology, and political science. We also collaborate with adjacent social science disciplines to strengthen social science research about environmental and sustainability issues. CESSS emerges from a long history of initiatives and collaborations within the social sciences at Örebro University which laid a solid foundation for the platform’s multidisciplinary collaboration.
CESSS works to enable a constructive and inclusive research environment that facilitates long-term research collaboration and development across disciplinary boundaries. CESSS is led by Karin Gustafsson (sociology), Erik Hysing (political science), and Maria Ojala (psychology).
The research at CESSS is divided into three interrelated themes.
- Theme 1: Public engagement concerning environmental and sustainability issues
- Theme 2: Environmental governance and the state
- Theme 3: Knowledge production, environmental expertise, and learning
CESSS’s work includes:
- Supporting the development of multi-disciplinary research projects and high-quality programs.
- Facilitating research collaborations in the field of environmental and sustainability studies, among both university researchers and external actors.
- Arranging internal CESSS conferences and international research workshops.
- Organizing a multi-disciplinary seminar series open to researchers from disciplines other than sociology, psychology political science, as well as for practitioners with an interest in environmental and sustainability social science. More information on this will be posted here later.
Researchers
- Monika Berg
- Sofia Bergbom
- Magnus Boström
- Åsa Callmer
- Ingemar Elander
- Carina Green
- Karin Gustafsson
- Erik Hysing
- Sara Karimzadeh
- Sammyh Khan
- Rolf Lidskog
- Martin Lind
- Erik Löfmarck
- Joakim Norberg
- Maria Ojala
- Jan Olsson
- Linda Soneryd
- Adam Standring
- Tetiana Tymoshenko
- Ylva Uggla
- Carolin Zorell
- Alessandra Paiusco, PhD student
- Amanda Rikner Martinsson, PhD student
Research projects
Active projects
- Social (im)possibilities of the formation of ethical consumption: A comparative study of Sweden and Iran
- (Un)sustainable lifestyles: social (im)possibilities to consume less
- A wicked problem occupation: exploring how climate change scientists identify and cope with their professional work
- Challenges and opportunities of the sharing economy
- Conceptual development of environmental sociology
- Divine Ganges, Profane Development: Sacred Geographies and the Governing of Pollution
- Does the ecosystem services approach matter? Evaluating its political and practical implications for Swedish biodiversity
- Learning to consume less: Can experiences during the C ovid-19 pandemic trigger lifestyle transformation?
- Prefiguring sustainable futures through food activism: How young people deal with border tensions between the sustainable and unsustainable in everyday life
- Reconciling safe and circular material flows - a case study of PFAS in the lifecycle of food packaging
- To trust or not to trust? Youth's attitudes, emotions, and trust in climate change science
- What role does climate change worry play in young people?s life and learning processes? A longitudinal study
News
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Conceptual development in understanding ethical consumption: Why we need a multilevel framework
In a recent article in Open Research Europe, Sara Karimzadeh and Magnus Boström, both affiliated with CESSS, challenge the oversimplified focus on individualistic factors in explaining ethical consumption, and argue for the importance of considering...
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Rethinking the boundaries of environmental expertise and the importance of lay knowledge
Scientific expertise is a core component of environmental discourse and one that is used to establish as well as scrutinize claims about climate change. Environmental scientific expertise has been important for setting climate change on the global policy...
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Climate change anxiety investigated in one of the largest international studies to date
Maria Ojala, affiliated with CESSS, is a co-author in one of the biggest multinational studies yet about young adults and climate change-related distress. Main author to the newly published article is Charles Ogunbode at Nottingham University. The study...
