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.