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Name
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Bio
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Prof. John Barry
Prof. of Political Science, Queens University Belfast |
Prof. John Barry is a father, a political activist, recovering politician and Professor of Green Political Economy in the Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action at Queens University Belfast. He is also co-chair of the Belfast Climate Commission, a member of the Committee on Climate Change’s Economics Advisory Group on Adaptation and Resilience, and member of the Sustainable Future Committee of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
What keeps him awake at night is the life opportunities and future wellbeing of his and other children in this age of the planetary emergency and intersecting social and economic injustices within and between countries. What also keeps him awake at night is the following question: why it is easier for most people to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism and economic growth? His areas of academic-activist research include post-growth and heterodox political economy; decarbonisation, democratisation and decolonisation; the politics, policy and political economy of climate breakdown and climate resilience; socio-technical analyses of low carbon just energy and sustainability transitions; climate injustice-based nonviolent direct action and social mobilisation; and the overlap between conflict transformation and these sustainability and energy transformations. His last book was The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World (2012, Oxford University Press), and he is currently writing a book provisionally entitled, The Greatest Story never told?: The origins, tyranny and end of ecocidal economic growth (2024, Agenda Publishers). |
