Research

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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.

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