UMN GEOG Coffee Hour - 2/14 - Amazon Power & Profit
This Friday's coffee hour will be presented by Geography PhD candidate, Spencer Cox, at 3pm in 445 Blegen. Coffee and snacks are available at 2:45.
Abstract: Climate change, caused by capitalist industrialization, poses a fundamental threat to human and nonhuman well-being. Slowing and adapting to climate change requires unparalleled investment into the built environment, shaping the city for people and planet rather than profit. Large industrial capitalists, in particular Amazon, have different plans. With social wealth they control, capitalists shape the direction of technological change, currently biasing automation and social control to sustain socially irrational private wealth accumulation. Given this terrain, what strategies may working and professional-middle class people use to seize control of social wealth, redirect investment towards social need, and to leverage this investment to build the power necessary to continue the struggle to transform social systems to address our climate crisis?
Abstract: Climate change, caused by capitalist industrialization, poses a fundamental threat to human and nonhuman well-being. Slowing and adapting to climate change requires unparalleled investment into the built environment, shaping the city for people and planet rather than profit. Large industrial capitalists, in particular Amazon, have different plans. With social wealth they control, capitalists shape the direction of technological change, currently biasing automation and social control to sustain socially irrational private wealth accumulation. Given this terrain, what strategies may working and professional-middle class people use to seize control of social wealth, redirect investment towards social need, and to leverage this investment to build the power necessary to continue the struggle to transform social systems to address our climate crisis?
Bio: Spencer Cox is a PhD candidate in GES whose research and activism is centered on the impact of Amazon on working class people, with the aim of developing applied research and strategy to help build working class power on the fulfillment center floor and in communities impacted by Amazon’s pursuit of profit and power.
