BENJAMIN
KAPLAN WEINGER

ABOUT
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Trained as a political geographer and urban political ecologist, I research local and planetary climate governance, from the UNFCCC regime to urban and municipal climate planning. I recently served in the Intergovernmental Support and Collective Progress Division of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, supporting negotiations, reporting, and the work of the Subsidiary Bodies. I previously served as a Climate Fellow in the City of Los Angeles Office of Energy and Sustainability where I supported implementation of the city’s Green New Deal and completed my doctoral fieldwork on urban climate governance.

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, Antipode, and others.
 

Research


Photos by author

My current research and dissertation employs qualitative research methods to trace the development of Los Angeles’s urban climate planning and governance. Examining the rise of an ostensible low-carbon urban polity, I analyze the implications of a burgeoning normative climate politics beyond the boundaries of this city. I draw on a two-year case study built on sustained ethnographic encounters and participant observation with Los Angeles’s municipal climate actors and activists from September 2021 to August 2023. In centering the daily practices of urban climate planners and their antagonists, this dissertation asks a series of questions around the ostensible implementation of low carbon urbanism.

My inquiry centers around 1) the territorial and distributional politics of climate transitions, seeking to complicate normative modes of accounting, spatially delimiting, and addressing the carbonization of urban governance; 2) understanding the geopolitical ecological implications of local climate transitions including impacts of ecologically unequal exchange, carbon leakage, relocation effects, and resource shuffling; and 3) examining whether the localized measures taken by municipalities to combat climate change significantly alter or reconfigure the systemic inequalities at the heart of broader ecological crises.

Click here for a video essay trailer. 

PUBLICATIONS




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.



  

CV

LABORATORY


“Venice Oil Field“- 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.
“Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis”- 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.

“Fossil Futures”-  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.

“Plastiglomerate”- 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.  

CONTACT




Benjamin Kaplan Weinger
bweinger@ucla.edu
UCLA Department of Geography
315 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095