Keynote speakers

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London and also at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, Helsinki. In his work, he has followed the global transformation of consumption and its impact on everyday life, politics and the environment. He was Director of the £5 million Cultures of Consumption research programme (UK) and a member of the DEMAND network, which analysed the dynamics of energy demand. His publications include: 'Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First' (Penguin 2016 and translated into several languages); 'Infrastructures in Practice' (with Elizabeth Shove); 'Scarcity in the Modern World' (with F. A. Jonsson et al.) and, most recently, 'Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022' (Penguin 2023). He has been a Moore Scholar at Caltech and has been awarded the Whitfield Prize, the Austrian Science Book Prize, the Humboldt Prize for Research and the 2023 Bochum Historians’ Prize.

© Photo: Jon Wilson

Manisha Anantharaman’s interdisciplinary research explores inequality in ecological transitions. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, (CNRS/Sciences Po) and Associate Fellow at Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House’s Environment and Society Program. As a critical scholar, she pays specific attention to how “environmental” initiatives—be it municipal recycling schemes, green space development, or global circular economy transition plans—reinforce or dismantle different manifestations of race, class, gender, and caste-based oppression. She has published numerous articles and two books connecting environmental justice, sustainability, and development: 'Recycling Class: The contradictions of inclusion in urban sustainability' (MIT Press, 2024) and a co-edited volume 'The Circular Economy and the Global South' (Routledge, 2019). Her current research projects include a Belmont Forum/US National Science Foundation project studying Digitalization and Sustainable Consumption and an action-research project on pro-poor circular economies. 

© Photo: Nico Oved

Tim Jackson is an ecological economist and writer. Since 2016 he has been Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey, UK. Tim has been at the forefront of international debates on sustainability for three decades. During five years at the Stockholm Environment Institute in the early 1990s, he pioneered the concept of preventative environmental management—a core principle of the circular economy—outlined in his 1996 book 'Material Concerns: Pollution Profit and Quality of life'. From 2004 to 2011 he was Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission where his work culminated in the publication of his controversial and ground-breaking book 'Prosperity without Growth'. In 2016, Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate for exceptional international leadership in sustainability. His book 'Post Growth—life after capitalism' (Polity Press, 2021) won the 2022 Eric Zencey Prize for Economics. His latest book 'The Care Economy' is to be published in February 2025.

© Photo: Andrea Bosch