The Commentaries from the OIMC series, a publication of the Interdisciplinary Observatory on Climate Change aimed at short, free-ranging essays produced by our team, has published its latest edition. Authored by José Maurício Domingues (IESP-UERJ), the text Commentary on a sad book (to seek hope): Bludhörn and the crisis of the movement and the eco-emanipatory project discusses the conjuncture of European and Latin American environmental movements and climate activists, based on a reading of the book Unhaltbarkeit. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (‘Unsustainability. Towards another modernity’; Suhrkamp, 2024), written by Ingolfur Blühdorn (University of Vienna – Austria).

Read an extract from this issue:

So, if what we were looking for was sustainability, today we have landed in unsustainability (and no longer simply a lack of sustainability), without, it bears repeating, anything resembling the end of the world being in question. On the other hand, leaving politics aside, environmental discourse has concentrated on a scientificisation that has left the concrete experience of citizens in the background at best. For Blühdorn, therefore, the reaction to this is a re-empowerment of these agents, which can even involve the construction of alternative facts and conspiracy theories.

PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE – UK), José Maurício Domingues is a tenured professor at the Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP-UERJ), where he coordinates the Centre for the Study of Social Theory and Latin America (Netsal). He is an associate researcher at the OIMC, working on the coordination of our Climate Emergency Collection. His research focuses on the fields of sociological and social theory, as well as critical theory. Its main areas of interest are general theory and political sociology in Brazil, Latin America and modern global civilisation, as well as specific themes such as socialism and climate change.