Dr Anneleen Kenis

Biography

Dr Anneleen Kenis is a lecturer in Human Geography at King’s College London. She holds a PhD in the field of Political Ecology (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium), and master degrees in Psychology (KU Leuven, Belgium) and Sustainable Development and Human Ecology (VUB, Belgium).

She enjoyed visiting scholarships at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University (Sweden), the Environmental Research Group at King’s College London, and the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Before starting as a lecturer at King’s, Anneleen was employed as a senior research fellow at Ghent University and KU Leuven (Belgium). She obtained funding for two research projects: ‘Just Air: The Spatial Politics of Urban Air Pollution’ and ‘Time and The Political: Navigating the Temporalities of Climate Change’. Before that, she worked as a research associate on the interdisciplinary EU-funded FP7 project SEFIRA (Socio-Economic Implications For Individual Responses to Air Pollution Policies in EU+27).

Anneleen's PhD was entitled ‘From individual to collective change and beyond. Ecological citizenship and politicisation’ and dealt with the ways in which individuals and movements understand their own environmental engagement in a politicising or depoliticising way. She co-authored the monograph: ‘The limits of the Green Economy: From Re-inventing Capitalism to Re-politicising the Present’ (Routledge).

Research

• The politics of climate change
• The politics of (urban) air pollution
• Activism and social movement studies
• Feminism, queer theory
• Science and technology studies
• Food, agriculture and GMOs
• (Urban) political ecology

Anneleen considers the framing of climate change as increasingly a temporal challenge. In this context, she looks into the role of emergency discourses, the image of the ticking clock, climate scenarios, intergenerational conflicts, narratives on progress and collapse, and other temporal framings in (de)politicising climate change.

She is interested in two research questions, firstly, how time and temporal discourses can lead to political subjectification, or rather demobilise or disempower people to act politically.

Second, how time and temporal discourses can undermine or contribute to the political quality of the space of plurality characteristic of democracy. An important example of this is how technocratic solutions, such as geo-engineering, are increasingly promoted by referring to the need to pull the ‘emergency brake’ or to ‘buy time’.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action
• 5SSG2063 BA Geography Research Tutorials
• 4SSG1008 Geography Tutorials: Critical Thinking and Techniques

Postgraduate

• 7SSGN106 Fundamentals of Environment, Politics and Development
• 7SSGN149 Resilience, Adaptation and Development
• 7SSGN168 Vulnerability, Development and Disasters
• 7SSGN002 Practising Social Research
• 7SSGN225 Research Design and Project Management

Further details

See Anneleen's research profile