Jeroen Oomen is assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio, where he focuses on the social, cultural, and scientific practices that create societies' conceptions of the future. Coming from an interdisciplinary background spanning philosophy, political science, sociology, and the history of science and technology, Jeroen's main interest is in how knowledge is made, and what the consequences are of particular types of knowledge for social organisations, democracy, and power structures. His main research interests are climate policy, geoengineering, and social theory, specifically where it concerns questions of sustainability.

This means that Jeroen questions how social processes allow us to imagine the future in particular ways, how such imagined futures become lived and enacted, and how they influence our search for a more sustainable future. Jeroen's newest book, Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics (co-written with Maarten Hajer, Oxford University Press, 2025) which argues that (environmental) politics is caught in “the cultural and political inability to imagine and enact futures that are meaningfully different from the present”. A review in Nature described the book as “powerful, timely and consequential”, “arguably the most important book on environmental politics in the past decade”. Additionally, Jeroen has published in leading journals of multiple disciplines, on the politics of futuring, political change, geoengineering, and climate politics at large.

Beyond the academy, Jeroen was co-led a scientific campaign against the normalization of solar geoengineering, which has attracted the support of academics globally and was covered in many major newspapers globally. He was also principal investigator on an advisory project for the German Umweltbundesamt (UBA). His first book, Imagining Climate Engineering: Dreaming of the Designer Climate (Routledge, 2021), in which Jeroen explores how and why climate engineering became a potential approach to anthropogenic climate change, was the inspiration for a museum exhibition at Design Museum Den Bosch. Furthermore, Jeroen regularly speaks on climate politics and geoengineering on national television, such as in a VPRO Tegenlicht documentary and podcast.

Jeroen Oomen received his doctorate from LMU Munich, and has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University and KTH Stockholm, where he was part of the Division of Science.

Key Words:

Captured Futures, Climate Engineering, Geoengineering, (Sociotechnical) Imaginaries, Techniques of Futuring, Climate Change, Anthropocene

Profile photo: Elisabeth Lanz Fotografie