Sebastian Svenberg
About Sebastian Svenberg
Sebastian Svenberg holds a PhD in Sociology and is a researcher in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Gothenburg. He specialises in the social studies of finance, climate imaginaries, queer temporalities, and transformations of capitalism.
His research examines how financial practices, institutions, and technologies shape climate governance and political decision-making. Through studies of fossil finance, pension funds, and divestment, he investigates how financial actors define environmental responsibility, manage climate risk, and influence societal transformation.
A second strand of his research explores climate imaginaries: the visions of the future that shape responses to environmental change. He examines how competing understandings of climate crisis, sustainability, and technological change influence public policy, investment strategies, and democratic politics.
Drawing on queer temporalities, Svenberg studies how assumptions about time, progress, and crisis shape political and economic action. His work examines how dominant temporal narratives both enable and constrain responses to climate change.
His research on transformations of capitalism brings these themes together by examining how climate change reconfigures relations between economy, democracy, and social inequality. His doctoral dissertation analysed historical struggles for economic democracy in the United Kingdom, while his more recent work conceptualises vulnerability as a relational and processual condition emerging through green and digital transformations.
Across these areas, Svenberg combines perspectives from Science and Technology Studies, environmental sociology, and queer-feminist scholarship to examine how knowledge, technologies, and institutions shape possibilities for democratic and sustainable futures.
Since September 2024, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the project Strategies for Just and Equitable Transitions in Europe. He is also working in the project Fossil Free Futures: Divestment across the Nordic Countries.