/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/current-students/images/Coffs-harbour_student-group_20220616_33-147kb.jpg)
/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/current-students/services/counselling/images/RS21533_English-College-Student_20191210_DSC_6961-117kb.jpg)
/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/study/scholarships/images/STEPHANIE-PORTO-108-2-169kb.jpg)
/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/study/arts-and-humanities/images/RS20958_Chin-Yung-Pang-Andy_20190309__79I5562-960X540.jpg)
/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/experience/images/SCU-INTNL-STUDY-GUIDE-280422-256-72kb.jpg)
/prod01/channel_8/media/dep-site-assets/component-library/screenshots/online-1X1.jpg)
/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/faculties-and-colleges/education/images/Tatiana-Sokolova-16X9.jpg)
Categories
Share
Thinking through power: Knowledge politics of transformations towards sustainability with Tatiana Sokolova, Doctoral student in Environmental Studies at the Department of Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden.
You are invited to our next SEAE Visiting Scholar Seminar event on Thursday, 30th April 2026.
The SEAE Research Centre Seminar Series promotes scholarly dialogue about transformational approaches that facilitate opportunities for profound change in education & research.
Abstact
What role does power play in socio-ecological justice? What does ‘power’ mean, and why are environmental social scientists so obsessed with it? This interactive seminar will be based on my PhD thesis, addressing the concept of 'transformations towards sustainability' through the power-knowledge lens.
I will present three different approaches to power and agency and the processes by which the ‘wheel of power’ comes to motion at a theoretical level, illustrating with examples from research on knowledge co-production and climate litigation.
We will discuss the questions: What idea of power does our research draw on, if any? How do these choices concretely manifest in the kinds of research, education, and societal engagement we create? What are the tensions and contradictions that we address – or fail to address – in our research, individually and collectively? What conceptual or empirical tensions and contradictions would we like to explore?
/prod01/channel_8/media/scu-dep/faculties-and-colleges/education/images/Tatiana-Sokolova-400X311.jpg)
Tatiana Sokolova
is a doctoral student in Environmental Studies at the Department of Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden.
She studies the interface between knowledge and politics of sustainability transitions and transformations, focusing especially on how power manifests in relationships between different societal actors in co-production of sustainability knowledge, imagination, and action. Her research has involved critical analysis of sustainability and research policies, political ontologies and power dynamics of research programmes, knowledge-action configurations of deliberative democracy, and prefigurative legality of climate litigation.
She is developing approaches to exploring socio-ecologically just sustainability transformations and the Anthropocene through creative writing, postmodern theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed. She is affiliated with Research Forum at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEFO/CEMUS) at Uppsala University and the GreenDeal-NET, a research network of the European Green Deal.