We are pleased to announce that three new members have joined the board of the Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam. This is the last in a series of three posts introducing them.
Prof. Dr. Jeff Diamanti is Professor of Global History of Sustainable Development at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (by special appointment courtesy of Stichting Unger-Van Brerofonds).
In my career so far, I have been developing the area of Critical Global Supply Chains. I have cultivated my own historical and empirically oriented research agenda with a focus on environmental humanities, critical sustainability studies and extractive ecologies, and I do this work in cross-disciplinary and field-based collaborations.
As part of my new multi-year research project on Transition Supply Chains, my chair as Special Professor of Global History of Sustainable Development at the VU courtesy of Stichting Unger-Van Brerofonds will investigate a tension emerging in the new cartography of trade implied by the sustainable transition: namely, while sustainable development since the 1970s has been premised on reducing the economic dependency of growth and prosperity on extractive industries, recent economic policy on post-hydrocarbon supply chains indicate that sustainable development will be exponentially more dependent on mined matter dug out from geographies far beyond the EU borders well into the century. Where will the critical raw materials needed for renewable energy and sustainable growth originate?
My first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021) tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. The book I’m finishing, Bloom Ecologies, follows the mining of phosphorous in the occupied Western Sahara to the aquatic currents forcing algal bloom and hypoxic milieu all over the planet. My longer-term project involves is building a research network on Supply Chain Criticism to document and evaluate the conflicts implied by the EUs Critical Raw Materials framework.
My work has appeared in the journals e-flux, Radical Philosophy, Social Science Information, SubStance, Stasis, New Formations, Postmodern Culture, Mediations, Western American Literature, Krisis, and Reviews in Cultural Theory, as well a number of books including After Ice (University of British Columbia Press), Fueling Culture (Fordham UP) and A Companion to Critical and Cultural Studies (Wiley-Blackwell).
I’ve also edited a number of book and journal collections including Contemporary Marxist Theory (Bloomsbury 2014); Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM’ Press 2018); Energy Culture (West Virginia University Press 2019); Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (2018); and a special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory on “Energy Humanities.” Recent editorial work includes the Solarities book collection (Punctum Press) with Cymene Howe and Amelia Moore, and a special issue of Postmodern Culture on “Field Theory.” I co-direct the ASCA Political Ecologies Seminar with Joost de Bloois, and with Amanda Boetzkes, co-organize “At the Moraine,” an ongoing research project on the political ecology of glacial retreat in the Arctic.
Recent interview on What’s Left of Philosophy can be found here.
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