Please join us for a special seminar presented by Evangelia Apostolopoulou.

Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Social Sciences Seminar Series

3:00-4:30pm 

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023 

Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy (Y2E2) Building, Room 299

 Evangelia Apostolopoulou, Senior Fellow Autonomous University of Barcelona

 Senior Associate, University of Cambridge

Radical Social Innovations and Grassroots Activism: Unveiling Pathways to Social-Environmental Sustainability and Justice

In this talk, Dr. Apostolopoulou draws on empirical evidence from several case studies across the Global South and North to explore how grassroots social innovations can pave pathways for addressing social-environmental injustices. By drawing on the research of human geographers and political ecologists, Dr. Apostolopoulou identifies possibilities, limitations, as well as patterns of spatial practices and pathways of rescaling and radical praxis, unveiling broadly shared resemblances across different places. Through this analysis, Dr. Apostolopoulou aims to make a twofold contribution to scholarship on environmental justice, grassroots activism, and social innovation. First, her aim is to reveal the connections between social-environmental movements, emerging grassroots innovations, and broader structural factors that either cause, enable, or limit them. Second, she seeks to explore how grassroots innovations arising from place-based community struggles can intersect with resistance practices. These endeavors strive not only to counteract social-environmental injustices and the depletion of the commons in the short term but also to forge enduring pathways toward social-environmental sustainability, justice, and transformative shifts in nature-society relations.

The seminar will be in-person in Y2E2 299, Thursday, November 2 from 3:00-4:30 pm. There will not be a hybrid option, but the talk will be recorded for those in the Stanford community who cannot attend in person.