Benjamin Kaplan Weinger
Education
M.A. Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 2022
Thesis: Thirty Years On: Planetary Climate Planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UNFCCC
B.A. Geography (Individualized), New York University, 2020
Research
Political geography; comparative climate planning; climate governance; the climate of history; ecologically unequal exchange; climate justice
My current research and dissertation employs qualitative research methods to trace the development of Los Angeles’s urban climate planning and governance. Examining the rise of an ostensible low-carbon urban polity, I draw on a two-year case study built on sustained ethnographic encounters and participant observation with Los Angeles’s municipal climate actors from September 2021 to August 2023. In centering the daily practices of urban climate planners, my dissertation asks a series of questions around the ostensible implementation of low-carbon urbanism. I focus on 1) the territorial and distributional politics of climate transitions; 2) the geopolitical ecological implications of local climate transitions including impacts of carbon leakage, relocation effects, and resource shuffling; and 3) whether the measures taken by municipalities to combat climate change significantly alter or reconfigure the methods through which carbon enters or exits the city.
Selected Publications
Weinger, B.K. 2023. Thirty years on: Planetary climate planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee. Global Environmental Change 80: 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102669.
Weinger, B.K. 2021. Scripting climate futures: The geographical assumptions of climate planning. Political Geography 88: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102409.
Weinger, B.K. 2021. The COVID-climate moment: Approximating planetary crisis in Palestine/Israel. Antipode. https://antipodeonline.org/2021/02/05/the-covid-climate-moment-in-palestine-israel/.
Arefin, M.R., & B.K. Weinger. 2020. Infrastructural occupations: Waste and electricity in Palestine. Cultural Geographies 28(3): 569-572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020978487.
Grants & Awards
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2020-2025)
UCLA Department of Geography Helin/Korpela Research Travel Grant (2022, 2023)
UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies Dissertation Research Fellowship (2023)
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2021, 2022)
