Dr Miriam Meissner (M.M.)
Connecting the fields of cultural studies and political ecology, the red thread running through my research is an interest in cultural practice responses to complex economic and ecological challenges. While my PhD focused on the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its portrayal in popular film, literature and photography, my more recent work focuses on the challenges of transitioning from a cultural hegemony of economic growth to degrowth. Following analyses in the environmental sciences, political economy, and decolonial theory, I consider this transition as an urgent social justice and ecological agenda, whose intricate cultural dimensions require further study. The attempt to develop a cultural studies perspective on degrowth therefore runs through my research and public engagement.
In the context of my research, I collaborate with the de-growth network Ontgroei, the housing cooperative De Nieuwe Meent (Amsterdam) and various environmental justice movements. To reflect and communicate beyond the medium of scientific writing, I'm also co-writing and editing the blog planetamateur.com.
For an overview of my publications, please see here: https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/persons/miriam-meissner/publications/
From Minimalist Forms to Post-Growth Economies? Advancing a Critical Formalist Perspective (NWO Veni project)
Environmental scientists increasingly highlight the need for industrialized societies to implement a drastic transformation towards post-growth economic systems in order to achieve urgent sustainability targets (please see IPBES & EEB). Simultaneously, there has been an upsurge in minimalist lifestyle narratives and resource-use projects. Examples range from lifestyle advice on simplicity, de-cluttering private homes, renouncing busyness and being idle to collective sharing, re-pair and re-use projects. Such initiatives implicitly reject key values of growth-oriented economics, such as the maximization of consumer demand and labor productivity. However, in contrast to the de-growth movement, most minimalist initiatives tend to not express an explicit opposition to growth economics but instead focus on the individual gains to be derived from everyday minimalism. The main aim of this research is to critically examine the affordance of contemporary minimalist initiatives in promoting post-growth economics through the innovation and re-visioning of socio-aesthetic ordering patterns (‘forms’). The concept of affordance describes the potential uses latent in forms. The research draws on Caroline Levine’s theory of forms, which extends formalist methods from art, literary and design studies to the analysis to socio-political institutions and their transformation. Using this trans-disciplinary framework, the research identifies the socio-aesthetic forms that minimalist initiatives either revise or innovate and examines their affordances in promoting post-growth values and practices. In a second step, the research critically enquires into the limits of minimalist initiatives in promoting post-growth through socio-aesthetic forms. It mobilizes insights from critical eco- and bio-political theory to understand why minimalist initiatives currently refrain from contesting consumer capitalism through means of collective political activism. To that end, the research combines methods of narrative, visual and conceptual analysis with ethnographic observation and interviews. Its scientific contribution consists in advancing a formalist perspective in political ecology, which studies emerging ordering patterns in everyday culture and eco-politics as interrelated.
Urban Imaginaries Research
My second resarch focus is urban imaginaries. My work in this field examines how urban practices, perceptions, experiences and representations across various media and geographies respond to and articulate global risks of finance and ecology, and how they shape the future of cities, communities and built environments. Key publications in this field include the monograph Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth (2017, Palgrave), and the co-edited volumes The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries (2018) and Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess and Abandonment (Routledge 2016).
