UNMAKING: a research programme on the disruption of capitalism in societal transformation to sustainability

Welcome to the website of the research programme UNMAKING, which aims to understand to what extent, under what conditions and through what processes radical grassroots innovations unmake modern, capitalist institutions and practice.

Radical civil society initiatives may hold the potential to transform society toward sustainability. This project will use a novel interdisciplinary theory and an innovative combination of methods to explain whether, when and how radical civil society initiatives unmake environmentally disruptive institutions and practices that are deeply ingrained in capitalist societies.

Leadership

This programme is led by Dr. Giuseppe Feola and hosted by the Section of Environmental Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development.

Funding

This research programme consists of two separate, but parallel projects funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through a Vidi Research Grant, and by the European Research Council (ERC) through a Starting Grant, respectively.

News

26 January 2023

Leonie Guerrero Lara presented at the Fachtag Solidarische Landwirtschaft 2023

Last week, Leonie Guerrero Lara gave a presentation ‘Where does the movement stand today, how does it define and delimit itself?’ which is based on her ...

15 January 2023

Two new publications

The UNMAKING team is happy to share two papers that were published in the first part of January 2023. The paper titled Degrowth and Agri-Food Systems: A ...

06 December 2022

Giuseppe Feola discussed project publications at KTH

Today Giuseppe Feola gave a guest lecturer at the Graduate School on ‘Reflexive and Critical Perspectives on Sustainability Transitions’ at the ...

30 October 2022

Jacob Smessaert presented at the Deep Commons 2022 Conference

Jacob Smessaert presented at the Deep Commons 2022 Conference. Jacob presented work on eco-anarchism in the panel session ‘Towards Radical Ecological ...

01 September 2022

Laura van Oers and Julia Spanier presented at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference

Laura van Oers and Julia Spanier presented at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference. Laura presented the paper titled ...

11 July 2022

Jacob Smessaert and Giuseppe Feola presented at SASE 2022

Jacob Smessaert and Giuseppe Feola presented papers at the 34th Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in Amsterdam (9-11 July). ...

06 July 2022

Laura van Oers and Jacob Smessaert presented research on Participatory Guarantee Systems

Laura van Oers and Jacob Smessaert presented at two events organized by the Dutch Community Supported Agriculture Network and the Buurmarkt Goedvolk on 28 ...

06 July 2022

Leonie Guerrero Lara presents at Food Justice Talks event

Leonie Guerrero Lara presented the paper ‘Community supported agriculture and degrowth: a one-sided love affair? An empirical study on the potential ...

04 July 2022

Giuseppe Feola presented at Chair of International relations, TU Darmstadt

Today Giuseppe Feola gave a talk titled ‘(Un)making capitalism in transformation to sustainability: The case of grassroots agri-food ...

01 July 2022

Giuseppe Feola presented at the International Political Ecology Summer School

On 30 June Giuseppe Feola presented gave a talk titled ‘Unmaking unsustainability: global environmental change, capitalism, and societal ...

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