Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism Network (TULE)

Nicole Kleinheisterkamp González

PhD Candidate, Syracuse University

Her research focuses on workers and unions in the green transition, particularly in industries undergoing restructuring due to decarbonization efforts. She is currently writing her dissertation on workers and unions in the German automobile and coal industries. While her work has primarily focused on “sunset” industries, she plans to expand her research to include lithium mining in the future.

Benjamin Velasco

Assistant Professor & Doctoral Student, University of the Philippines

Benjamin Velasco is an Assistant Professor at the School of Labor and Industrial Relations of the University of the Philippines. He is finishing his dissertation on improving the conditions of garment workers through worker-driven social responsibility. His other research interests include just transition for informal transport and single-use plastic workers.

Brendan Davidson

PhD Candidate, Colorado State University

Brendan is a doctoral candidate at Colorado State University where he studies the politics of energy and labor. His work focuses on the political economy of work in transition, with a particular focus on workers affiliated with the expanding renewable energy sector.

Christian Pépin

Postdoctoral Fellow, Université du Québec en Outaouais

Christian Pépin is a comparative political economist specialized in state economic policies, finance and class politics. His research focuses on the roles of industrial policies and public financial institutions under “green” capitalism, their impacts on the future of work, and their democratic and emancipatory alternatives.

Vinnie Collins

PhD Candidate, York University

Vinnie’s PhD thesis research focuses centrally on the role of labour unions organizing amidst the climate crisis. His research is a comparative analysis across two key sites of labour engagement in the climate crisis, Scotland and New York. Vinnie was recently awarded the CRIMT Institutional Experimentation for Better Work Project Partnership: Studentship Fund award.

Isaac Thornley

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto Scarborough

Isaac is interested in the ideological dimensions of the energy transition. His postdoctoral research examines Canada’s EV battery supply chain, drawing on political ecology and critical theory. This builds off his doctoral work on Canadian pipeline politics (specifically, the Trans Mountain Expansion project), where he undertook a psychoanalytic ideology critique of social license. 

Ewan Kerr

Postdoctoral Researcher, Glasgow Caledonian University

Ewan Kerr is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Glasgow Caledonian University, where he received his PhD in 2021. His research interests lie within the discipline of political sociology, with a focus upon trade union and labour movement studies, climate politics, and state-society relations during crisis periods. His most recent co-authored research has been published in Critical Sociology, The Political Quarterly, and Economic and Industrial Democracy.

Jonathan Michaud

PhD Student, Université de Montréal

A doctoral candidate and lecturer in industrial relations at the Université de Montréal, Jonathan Michaud works on a partnership agreement with the United Steelworkers on three cases of just transition in local unions, at plant level, in different regions of Quebec under the supervision of Professor Mélanie Laroche.

Evelyn Dionne (she/her)

PhD Candidate at Université Laval

Evelyn Dionne’s research examines the role of labour unions in the just transition to a low-carbon economy. Her work explores the emerging skills development needs and inter-union tensions, underscoring how climate change exacerbates workforce vulnerabilities and resilience requirements.

Franziska Paul

Lecturer in Political Economy, University of Glasgow

My research explores questions of ownership and transformation (social, economic, environmental) across a wide range of sectors. I have a specific interest in de-privatisation and democratisation, and ways that labour has mobilised around these issues. I am also involved with the Public Futures database, and an Associate of the Public Banking Project (McMaster University).

Damian McIlroy

PhD Graduate, Queen’s University Belfast

Damian’s research is aimed at furthering our understanding of the human agency that inspires anti-capitalist approaches to just transition. His project has a specific focus on the colonial/hegemonic nature of capitalism and its integral relationship with climate breakdown and ecological catastrophe. As a solution, he examines the potential of organised labour and social movement agency to bring about a just transition against and beyond the social relations of capitalism.

Lucas Cifuentes Croquevielle

PhD Student, The University of Manchester

I’m a labor sociologist currently completing my thesis on the labor regime in Chilean lithium mining within the context of the energy transition. My research focuses on labor processes, industrial relations, and occupational health and safety. I also work with unions on training initiatives and labor studies.

Neha Rane

Policy Professional

Neha is trained in Economics at undergraduate level, soon moved to public policy, a multidisciplinary field for post-graduation studies. A researcher by profession her interests vary from urban policy, coastal policy, environmental law, trade unions in fisheries sector. She has worked in different parts of India with communities, organisations, government bodies which has helped her get a good grasp on implementation aspects of policy making. Over last few years she has been focusing on the Konkan region in Maharashtra, India as the location of her research interest. She intends to continue working with people as a policy professional in the future.

Bruce Baigrie

PhD Student, Syracuse University

Bruce Baigrie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. He completed his master’s degree in Conservation Biology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he is originally from. His dissertation examines the comparative histories of electricity sector restructuring and privatization in South Africa and Mexico. Despite a range of shared features—including historic trade union federations and state-owned utilities—privatization proliferated in Mexico but stalled in South Africa. Through a framework of contesting class coalitions, with labor at the core of state ownership, Bruce’s research seeks to illuminate what a public energy transition might require today—one freed from the imperatives of profitability.

Stephanie Eccles

Postdoctoral Researcher

Stephanie Eccles is a political ecologist and geographer whose research interrogates the role of industrial animal agriculture in the climate crisis. As a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of the Fraser Valley’s Food and Agriculture Institute, her research examines the socio-technical dimensions of a Just Transition within the Canadian agricultural sector. She focuses on the emergence of novel alternative protein production systems and how they engage with ongoing farm worker justice movements and labour organizing. Stephanie is a member of the Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism Network (TULE) and active in the labour movement in Montréal, Quebec.

Bianca Luna Fabris

Researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI)

Bianca Luna is a researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) with interests in social protection, climate change, and the role of trade unions in Europe. Alongside her work at the ETUI, she is pursuing a PhD in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh on trade unions’ policy preferences toward income protection in France and Italy. She holds MSc degrees from the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh, and a BA from the University of Milan.

Niranjana Ramesh

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the Department of Geography & Environmental Sciences, Queen Mary University of London.

Niranjana is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the Department of Geography & Environmental Sciences, Queen Mary University of London. She works with people whose lives are shaped and often lived around water in south eastern India, most recently artisanal fishers on this part of the Indian Ocean shoreline. She’s interested in questions of political ecology, inhabitation and foodways that have emerged from this research work.

Clelia Li Vigni

PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy)

Clelia is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. Her PhD research focuses on labour relations and the labour process in the automotive industry. Specifically, she examines car factories of a large multinational company in Italy and France, examining the evolution of the social relations of production and the role of trade unions within the context of electrification and global production restructuring.