Postdoctoral researcher in environmental justice

**Offer** --------- **UCLouvain is hiring a** **Postdoctoral researcher in environmental justice** **Job Id : SF** **38956** Internal and external job posting until... **For institute** **Institute for the Analysis of Change in Contemporary and Historical Societies** **of** **Social sciences and humanities sector** **Main campus :** **Louvain-la-Neuve** **Fixed-term,** **full-time** **(100%) contract, until December 31, 2029** **Starting date : January 2027** **Introduction** ---------------- The **Environment, Organisations, Society (EOS)** research centre at UCLouvain (Belgium) is hiring a full-time postdoctoral researcher (3-year fixed-term contract) as part the FNRS-funded research project “SETBACK - A study of environmental justice backsliding”. The postdoc will be supervised by Prof. Brendan Coolsaet (FNRS/UCLouvain) and Prof. Louise Knops (ULB), co-PIs of the SETBACK project. **Project description** Environmental justice emerged in the United States through the decades-long struggle of a potent community-driven environmental justice movement. From this movement emerged a string of governmental initiatives reorganising its environmental policy according to the fact that minority and low-income populations are disproportionally impacted by pollution and environmental degradation. Environmental justice followed a clear institutionalization trajectory: after its emergence from grassroots movements, it became part of the institutional, academic and political ‘mainstream’. This trajectory of institutionalization came to a halt with, among others, the re-election of Donald Trump and the platform this gave to the scapegoating of environmental policies to meet the US far-right’s political objectives. During its first 100 days in office, Trump’s administration eliminated environmental justice from across the federal government, closed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) federal Environmental Justice Office and its 10 regional offices, and cancelled countless ongoing and planned research projects, grants, and fellowships on environmental and climate justice. Environmental action and policy is meeting increasingly fierce resistance in Europe, too, through attacks on the EU’s Green Deal and increasing forms of climate backlash, the criminalization of environmental activism across many Western liberal democracies, and a resurgence of climate-denial, even as the evidence of accelerating climate change becomes a tangible lived experienced for increasing shares of the world population. Efforts to accelerate Europe’s environmental transformation have come up against “justice barriers”: environmental policies and climate action are likely to be undermined and contested if they are perceived to be unfair or illegitimate or if people's needs or voices are not adequately taken on board by decisionmakers. In a paradoxical turn of events, the fight against environmental policy has sometimes been done in the name of disenfranchised