MA Studio SoSe 2025
Dr. Juliana Canedo

Learning from Insurgent Practices
in Times of Climate Emergency

Global urbanization, based on extractive logics of production and living, poses a critical threat to planetary sustainability. Climate injustice and environmental racism highlight that vulnerable communities and countries that have contributed least to the current scenario are likely to be the most affected ones. Beyond that, we observe that in different contexts, oppressed and dispossessed people on the margins of capitalism – campesinos, indigenous, traditional communities (African descendant, riverine, etc) – have a lot to teach us in terms of organizing practices and insurgent ways of living that resist both the advance of climate emergency in their territories and the consequences of a neoliberal development system that destroys their spaces and ways of life. In 2025, COP30 will be held in the Amazonian city of Belém, Brazil. In the context of extreme climate events in Brazil and the world, we continue to witness the ongoing exploitation of people and nature by agribusiness, mining and oil corporations. With a critical approach towards events such as COP 30, this research-based studio aims to investigate counter-hegemonic forms of inhabitation performed by grass-roots groups. Their society-nature relations have the potential to tension hegemonic modes of urban development, redesign spatial relations and promote innovative and more sustainable modes of living, building and producing. During the studio, students will engage through inputs and conversations with different international actors, work on diverse case studies and discuss counter-hegemonic formats of representing and understanding spaces. 

The Studio is developed in cooperation with Fernanda Petrus (UPO), Aman Azevedo (UFRJ) and Francesca Ceola (TUB). It is also connected to the X-Tutorial course The Earth we Tread and will be linked to an excursion to Brazil in the winter semester, where students will participate in a workshop in cooperation with Brazilian universities and other actors.

Photo: © Juliana Canedo

Download poster here.