University of Gothenburg
University of Gothenburg
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Carl Cassegård

Professor

Department of Sociology and Work
Science
Telephone
+46 31-786 49 81
Mail
carl.cassegard@socav.gu.se
Visiting address
Skanstorget 18
41122 Göteborg
Room number
F320
Postal address
Box 720
40530 Göteborg

About Carl Cassegård

CARL CASSEGÅRD has taught and researched as a sociologist at the University of Gothenburg since 2009. His research has largely been in the field of cultural sociology and social theory. His research on how literature and popular culture can be used to trace shifting experiences of modernity and shifts in the ideal of the ”good life” led to dissertations in sociology at Kyoto University in Japan in 2002 and at Lund University in Sweden in 2004, and to a book, Shock and Naturalization, which was published in 2007. Carl’s research since 2003 mainly relates to social movements. Much of his interest concerns the experience of modern society – as shocking or natural, unresponsive or as an environment that we have the power to reshape – and how this experience is influenced by marginalization and by engagement in social movements and activism. This led to the book Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan which was published in 2014. In recent years he has been especially interested in the environmental movement and the question of what makes people engage in environmental activism even when they lose hope in the possibility of saving the world. The book Toward a Critical Theory of Nature: Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics, which was published in 2021, is a theoretical work on the relation between capitalism and nature, and the possibilities of critique in a world characterized by catastrophes. Together with Håkan Thörn he is also the author of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism: The Green Movement in Times of Catastrophe (2022) and I apokalypsens skugga. Miljörörelser och industrikapitalism 1870-2020 (2023). Theoretically his background is in Marxism and Critical Theory, and several of his texts discuss thinkers in this tradition.

Specialist Fields Social movements, empowerment, urban space and gentrification, the public sphere, collective trauma, and theories of modernity.

Current research Since 2021 he studies the environmental movement in the project "Adapting to Climate Change: Emotions and Narratives in the Environmental Movement".