Joan Martinez-Alier: environmental conflicts and conflicts of valuation
This seminar by Zora Kovacic will give an overview of the main concepts developed by 2023 Holberg Prize winner Joan Martinez-Alier.
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The 2023 Holberg Prize, one of the largest international prizes awarded annually to an outstanding researcher in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology, was recently awarded to Catalan scholar Joan Martinez-Alier.
Martinez-Alier is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). He will receive the award during an 8 June ceremony at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Martinez-Alier receives the Prize for his ground-breaking research in ecological economics, political ecology and environmental justice. He is known for criticizing established economic theory and traditional approaches to economic growth. Martinez-Alier is also a major figure and leading public intellectual in the burgeoning movement for "degrowth".
At this seminar, Zora Kovacic will focus on Martinez-Alier's work on the environmentalism of the poor, languages of valuation and environmental justice. His work contributed to the critique of the monetary valuation of the environment and to the development of alternative approaches that aim at giving visibility to indigenous and local knowledge. Martinez-Alier is considered one of the founding fathers of ecological economics.
The webinar is open for anyone interested, and to participate you only need to click on the Zoom link at noon (CET) on Monday 24 April.
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Zora Kovacic is associate professor II at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT) at UiB and Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the Urban Transformation and Global Change (TURBA) lab, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She holds a PhD from Martinez-Alier's home institute, ICTA-UAB, on the use of complexity theory in the assessment of science for policy.
