Sebastian Svenberg
About Sebastian Svenberg
Sebastian Svenberg is a sociologist working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), economic sociology, and critical theory. He holds an MA in Sociology from University of Gothenburg and a PhD in Sociology from Örebro University, where he was affiliated with the Environmental Sociology Section.
His research foregrounds STS approaches to questions of finance, sustainability, and institutional change. Drawing on historical and contemporary cases, he examines how socio-technical systems, such as financial infrastructure, public funds, and the climate transition, are shaped by shifting normative visions of democracy, economy and temporality. His doctoral dissertation analysed historical struggles for economic democracy in the United Kingdom, contributing to theoretical debates on institutional transformation and the politics of economic organisation.
In his more recent publication, Svenberg developed an STS-informed analyses of fossil finance, queer temporalities, and crisis. He has written on divestment, pension fund investment strategies, and the role of financial actors in enabling or constraining transitions away from fossil fuels. His work highlights how climate change mitigation is not only a technical and economic challenge, but also a question of knowledge production, power, and democratic accountability.
Since September 2024, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the project Strategies for Just and Equitable Transitions in Europe. He is also part of 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. Across his work, Svenberg emphasises the imaginations and conflicts surrounding technology, markets, and political order in the context of climate and environmental transformations.