Research Institute for Sustainability Helmholtz Centre Potsdam

Senior Fellow

Prof. John Meyer

Senior Fellow

John M. Meyer is Professor of Politics at California Polytechnic State University,Humboldt. There, he also serves in interdisciplinary programs on Environmental Studies and Environment & Community. As a political theorist, his current project explores the intersection between climate politics and the political potentials and dangers of populism. Meyer is the author of the award-winning Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma (MIT, 2015) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (Oxford, 2016). He is editor-in-chief of the international journal, Environmental Politics.

CV Download:

  • Climate Politics, Justice, and Populism
  • Politics of Sustainability
  • Environmental Political Theory
  • Engaging Everyday Practices
  • Experimentalism and Climate Politics

Publications at the RIFS

Publications prior to joining the RIFS

  • Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Edited with Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, and David Schlosberg. Oxford University Press, 2016. Paperback edition, 2019.
  • Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma. The MIT Press, 2015.
  • Author or editor of 6 other books and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

  • "Experimentalism, Vanguardism, or What? Strategies for Systemic Change and Sustainability." Keynote Speaker, International Research Workshop: "Can We Experiment Ourselves Out of the Crisis?" Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria, November 2021.
  • "An Environmental Politics of the Everyday: Material Participation and Populist Resonances." Keynote Speaker, workshop on "Material Grassroots Politics, Doing Citizenship and the Political," University of Siegen, Germany, July 2019.
  • "Climate Change, Environmentalism, and the Resonance Dilemma." Robert and Mary Neher Global Sustainability Lecture, University of La Verne, California, April 2017.
  • "Environmentalism, New Materialism, and the Resonance Dilemma." Talk sponsored by Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, and the University of Oklahoma Department of English, April 2015.

  • Engaging the Everyday honored as the inaugural "Clay Morgan Award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory," 2018.
  • Political Nature one of three books honored as "Great Works in Environmental Political Thought," Western Political Science Association, 2012.

Editor-in-Chief, Environmental Politics, 2020-present.

Editor, Environmental Politics, 2016-2020.

Editorial Board, Journal of Politics, 2015-2018.  

Associate Editor, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2013-2016.