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 is the author of the book Imagining Climate Engineering: Dreaming of the Designer Climate (Routledge, 2021). In this book, Jeroen explores how and why climate engineering became a potential approach to anthropogenic climate change. Specifically, he showcases how views on the future of climate change and climate engineering evolved by addressing the ways in which climate engineers view its respective physical, political, and moral domains. Additionally, Jeroen has published various articles on how the future at large, or of specific technologies, comes to be imagined and performed in the field of sustainability.

In the past, Jeroen Oomen did his PhD-research at LMU Munich, was a Marie Curie PhD Fellow as part of the Environmental Humanities for a Concerned Europe research grant, was part of the Rachel Carson Center's Environment and Society Program and part of the research department of the Deutsches Museum. Jeroen has also been a visiting researcher at Harvard University, where he conducted research into the scientific and political conceptions that fuel climate engineering research and its output, and KTH Stockholm, where he was part of the Division of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Key Words:

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

Profile photo: Elisabeth Lanz Fotografie