ABOUT
I hold a B.A. in Geography and Anthropocene Studies from NYU, and an M.A. and C.Phil in Geography from UCLA. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Association of Geographers and can be found in Global Environmental Change, Political Geography, Environmental Development, and more.
Research
My primary research and the subject of my dissertation traces the development of Los Angeles’s climate decarbonization and sustainability policies. Through two years of embedded ethnography within the Los Angeles Office of Energy and Sustainability, as well as with climate movements on the ground, I analyze how climate planning is institutionalized, negotiated, and stabilized, and how “best practice” models travel outward from Los Angeles to shape global urban climate agendas. By centering the organizational and bureaucratic practices of climate planners, as well as social movement mobilization in response, I investigate how planners translate global climate targets into local administrative routines, budgeting and implementation, and modes of longevity.
Click here for a video essay trailer.
Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the UNFCCC, my research examines the institutional design debates within the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee and the resistance articulated by social movements, Indigenous peoples, and state actors in the Global South. Drawing on extensive UNFCCC archival materials and institutional ethnography within the UNFCCC Secretariat and COP sessions, I analyze how power asymmetries, procedural rules, geographical norms, and knowledge infrastructures stabilized the Framework Convention and marginalized alternative proposals for more accountable legal frameworks, shaping the architecture of governance that persists today.
Another series of projects examines climate policy in conflict zones as tools of territorial control. I use Palestine/Israel as a case to show how ostensibly depoliticized, technoscientific climate planning, such as UNDP adaptation strategies, operates within the power asymmetries of occupation and state-building. I argue that UNFCCC institutional measures, particularly since the Paris Agreement, construct a sanitized, ostensibly “even” playing field while sidestepping profound developmental and political inequalities.
TEACHING
At UCLA, I have had the pleasure of serving as a Teaching Assistant for numerous courses, including People and Earth's Ecosystems and Cultural Geography. My teaching philosphy aims to expose inequities structured into global social orders. Attempting to bring the abstraction of climate change back to the scale and experiences of daily life, I strive to shift discussions away from dominant planetary modeling and data so as to highlight those on the front lines of climatic changes—past, present, and future.
My pedagogical practice encourages students to critically evaluate their own positionality within global systems of inequality, foregrounding how those of us possessing forms of geographical privilege, be it carbon privilege or otherwise, benefit from spatial relations that perpetuate suffering and ecological crisis experienced by communities elsewhere. As an educator, I believe students’ lived knowledges must inform their study, rather than be excluded from it. And I am committed to creating intellectual spaces for those who find themselves at odds with everything around them and have to “invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” (bell hooks).
Please click on the files below to access my sample teaching materials for People and Earth’s Ecosystems at UCLA.
LABORATORY
This kaleidoscope above transforms fragments of ocean microplastic, gathered from the very beaches where industrialists extracted and accumulated oil in Los Angeles, into a vibrant yet unsettling composition. Bound together by raw oil globs, these abstracted plastics twisting around in circles reflect the temporal cycle of fossil fuel as both marvel and scourge—born from ancient fossilized matter, consumed in the present, and destined to endure indefinitely. The interaction creates a dynamic interplay: move forward and the fragments explode outward in a riot of chaos, an eruption of destruction; move backward and it collapses inward, a black hole of ecological degradation and colonial extraction. The ungraspable entanglement of fossil capital, ecological degradation, and enduring colonial impact mark the landscape with a dizzying fusion of anthropocenic (or capitalocenic) permanence.
A Truvada container reborn, brimming with a kaleidoscope of microplastic fragments. They mirror the shattered facets of my mental being, once confined by the grip of OCD. Each piece is meant to be offered to a patient in the OCD Intensive Treatment Program as a pre-exposure therapy prophylaxis to remember how chaos intertwines with resilience.
This furniture series weaves vibrant hues of epoxy and ocean microplastics from Los Angeles beaches into a narrative of deep geological time. Each piece embodies the entanglement of labor, industry, and ecological impact, reflecting the imprint of fossil capital on the Earth’s past and present. The materials—epoxy as a forever chemical and microplastics as persistent pollutants—serve as a haunting reminder that we are threads in an unfolding tapestry of time, both creators and inheritors of its legacy.
I build upon the work of Charles Moore, Patricia Corcoran, Kelly Jazvac, and Kirsty Robertson to complete a political ecology of "plastiglomerate," a geological conglomeration of plastic marine debris, volcanic basalt, sand, and shells first identified in Kaʻū, Hawai’i. Plastiglomerate has been proposed as an informal marker of the Anthropocene epoch, symbolizing the entanglements of nature and culture. I collected and examined the material's vitality from the remote Kamilo Beach, exploring how it embodies the social, political, and ecological forces that shape it. Plastiglomerate is neither inert nor apolitical; it is a fusion of occupation, colonialism, the petrochemical industry, militarization, and broader structures of the discard society, offering a stark reminder of the complex legacies that persist in both physical and symbolic form.
Benjamin Kaplan Weinger
bweinger [at] ucla.edu
315 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Website design: BKW. Font: Klima by Matthew Hinders Anderson, Fonts for a Progressive Future.