The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
All content for Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks is the property of Hosted by Dolly & Finn Arne Jørgensen and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Matthew Archer, Assistant Professor in Social Science at Maastricht University (Netherlands), discussed his book Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability (NYU Press, 2024) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on 12 February 2024.
In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.
And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.
The book draws on diverse sources of evidence—ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction—and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.
Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks
The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
