Academic interests
Sebastian Svenberg specialises in social studies of finance, climate imaginaries, queer temporalities, and transformations of capitalism.
Background
Sebastian Svenberg is part-time teacher and researcher at TIK. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Örebro University, where he was affiliated with the Environmental Sociology Section, and an MA in Sociology from the University of Gothenburg. His research is situated within Science and Technology Studies (STS), with a particular focus on the social studies of finance, climate and sustainability.
His research explores how finance, climate governance, and technological change are shaped through political contestation and competing imaginaries of democracy, economy, and the future. His doctoral dissertation analysed historical struggles for economic democracy in the United Kingdom, examining how the separation between the political and the economic has been produced, contested, and reconfigured.
More recently, Svenberg has published on fossil finance, climate imaginaries, queer temporalities, and pension fund investment strategies. His recent research has developed along two related lines of inquiry. In one strand, drawing on Science and Technology Studies, he examines climate imaginaries, the temporal politics of environmental crisis, and the limits of crisis imagination in shaping responses to climate change. In another, informed by STS and queer-feminist scholarship, he conceptualises vulnerability as relational, situated, and processual rather than a fixed social condition. This work examines how green and digital transformations reshape everyday relations of inequality, dependence, agency, and resistance, and how vulnerability emerges across changing configurations of gender, class, age, migration, occupation, and place.
Since September 2024, Svenberg has, at University of Gothenburg, been a postdoctoral researcher in the Horizon Europe project Strategies for Just and Equitable Transitions in Europe (ST4TE). He is also a researcher in the project Fossil Free Futures: Divestment across the Nordic Countries, where he studies the Norwegian case of pension funds withdrawing investments from coal, oil, and fossil gas.
Svenberg teaches at TIK and is part-time employed in the project Stakes of Democracy.