Carl CassegårdJune 2025

8 May 2025

Carl Cassegård has taught and researched as a sociologist at the University of Gothenburg since 2009, mostly in the fields of cultural sociology, social movement studies, 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. Much of his research since 2003 concerns how the experience of modern society is influenced by marginalization and by engagement in social movements and activism. The interest in this topic led to the book Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan which was published in 2014. In the recent decade, 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.

A warm welcome to the Centre, Carl!