Research Institute for
Sustainability | at GFZ

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.