Publications

Mads Ejsing. 2025. New Materialism. Environmental Humanities Glossary. University of Copenhagen.

In the not-so-distant past, much of the humanities and social sciences treated the material world – the stuff of rocks, rivers, bones, and buildings – as passive scenery. Nature was the backdrop. Humans were the actors. We built, interpreted, imagined, and destroyed, while the world around us mostly reacted, inert and voiceless. But what if matter matters more than we thought? Emerging in the early 2000s, but drawing from a...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. Citizen Assemblies: Deliberative Mini-Publics for a Sustainable Future. A Climate for Sufficiency: 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report.

To enable “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” of society (IPCC ), there is a need to change societal norms and behaviour. Unfortunately, just when structural changes are needed the most, trust in governments is historically low, and many citizens feel that the current systems do not work for them (OECD 2024). Therefore, there is also a high risk of political conflict and polarisation around climate pol...

Danielle S Spence, Maureen G Reed, James P Robson, Bianca Currie, Eureta Rosenberg, Marlis Merry, Jana Gengelbach. 2025. Intercultural networks deepen learning for transformative sustainability education: lessons from co-designing transdisciplinary international learning labs. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101567

In this paper, we emphasize the value of an intercultural network of researchers, students, and practitioners engaged in co-creating and delivering transdisciplinary sustainability learning opportunities. The network, the Trans disciplinary E ducation C ollaboration for T ransformations in S ustainability (TRANSECTS), is a north–south partnership with hub universities in Canada, Germany, and South Africa. Here, we in...

Danielle S. Spence, Kristin J. Painter, Ali Nazemi, Jason J. Venkiteswaran, Helen M. Baulch. 2025. Climate variability and flow management impact phytoplankton biomass in a shallow reservoir. Environmental Science: Advances. https://doi.org/10.1039/D5VA00094G

Shallow, eutrophic lakes often exhibit high and extremely variable phytoplankton biomass. This variability makes drinking water supply from shallow lakes particularly vulnerable to rapid change, as phytoplankton blooms can strongly impact treatment processes. Using 39 years of water quality data (typically bi-weekly), this study investigates the roles of climate variability and flow management in driving change in chlorophyll ...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. Re-Assembling Democracy: A Nascent Theory of Nonhuman Political Participation. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2025.7218303

This article explores the concepts of political participation through the lens of new materialism and critical democratic theory. It argues that the concept of political participation must be expanded beyond rational and reflective actions by human beings in order to better encompass the agency of nonhuman entities. Drawing on the work of Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Noortje Marres, and others, the article offers a new theoreti...

Mads Ejsing, Lars Tønder, Ingrid Helene Brandt Jensen, Janus Hansen. 2025. Do we have time for democracy? Climate action and the problem of time in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196241279564

The urgency of climate change has brought democracy to a critical juncture. Existing democratic systems struggle to address the pressing time frames required for effective climate action. This article explores a fundamental shift in temporal orientation caused by climate change. Democracy’s linear and progressive image of time clashes with the expanding scales of temporality, encompassing both planetary and microscopic process...

Max Mailund, Dorte Nita Simonsen, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Toxic displacements: An environmental justice perspective on a chemical waste site in Denmark. Political Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103255

In this article we examine the problem of toxic waste and its entanglements with environmental justice in the Anthropocene from the perspective of Harboøre Tange – the waste site of one of the greatest chemical pollution scandals in Danish environmental history. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we show how environmental harms and inequalities are sustained over time through a series of ‘toxic displ...

Fernando Racimo, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rebecca Leigh Rutt, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Degrowth and decolonisation in academia. Degrowth Journal. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.09

Like other societal institutions, academia today faces an existential crisis. Rising inequality and authoritarianism, coupled with climate breakdown and collapsing ecosystems, are threatening the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and shared. At the same time, academics are coming to terms with their institutions’ role in contributing to these processes, particularly in the Global North. Many are recognising...

Jim Leape, Bronwen Golder, Richard Barnes, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Dawn Borg-Costanzi, Jessica L Decker Sparks, Jaeyoon Park, Robert Blasiak, Elizabeth R Selig, Shinnosuke Nakayama, Colette C.C. Wabnitz. 2025. Leveraging port state measures to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads1592

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing threatens the sustainability of fisheries and communities dependent on them. The Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA) is a key tool for combatting IUU fishing by foreign fleets, requiring standardized inspections, information sharing, and port denial. Using satellite data, we characterized how PSMA has affected high seas vessel behavior and identify opportunities to strengthen...

Colette C.C. Wabnitz, Gabriel Reygondeau, Bianca Silva Santos, Juliano Palacios-Abrantes, Thomas Lukas Frölicher, William W. L. Cheung, U. Rashid Sumaila. 2025. Climate change drives shifts in straddling fish stocks in the world’s ocean. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adq5976

Climate-induced distribution changes are particularly challenging for fisheries targeting fish populations shared between exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and the high seas, known as straddling stocks. Here, we combine multiple datasets and ecosystem modeling to identify the presence of straddling stocks worldwide and consider the management implications of climate change–driven shifts. We identify 347 straddling stocks across ...