Aysem MertSenior lecturer, Associate professor
About me
(she/they, Dr./Mx. – why do pronouns matter?)
Ayşem Mert is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. At the department her responsibilities include directing the International Masters Programme In Social Science Environmental Studies (IMPRESS), teaching environmental politics and governance courses at all levels, and doing research. Her expertise is on discourses of democracy and environment at transnational and global levels, public-private cooperation in environmental governance, sustainability partnerships, and the Anthropocene. She employs psychoanalytic and interpretive methods, especially political discourse theory and critical fantasy studies, collaborates with artists and stakeholders in transdisciplinary projects, and draws on political theory and philosophy to better understand global governance institutions and contemporary perceptions of naturecultures. Her current projects focuses on environmental governance after the pandemic, and climate adaptation in communities that survive wildfires.
Ayşem holds a PhD in global environmental governance (2012, VU Amsterdam), and master’s degrees in environmental studies (2005, Boğaziçi University) and IR (2002, International University of Japan). Before she joined the department in 2017, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Centre for Global Cooperation Research (Germany) and Amsterdam Global Change Institute (The Netherlands), and as faculty at the Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam and Institute for Environmental Social Sciences and Geography, Freiburg University.
Ayşem is the author of Environmental Governance through Partnerships: A discourse theoretical study (2015, Edward Elgar) and co-edited Public–Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development (Pattberg et al. 2012), and the Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century (Horn et al. 2023). She published several peer-reviewed and popular scientific articles in English, Turkish, and Dutch. She has been the co-/editor of Earth System Governance Working Papers, and Üç Ekoloji (Three Ecologies), and serves in the editorial boards of International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (INEA) and Earth System Governance journals.
X: @ayshemm
ResearchGate: www.researchgate.net/profile/Aysem_Mert2
Academia: su-se.academia.edu/Ay%C5%9FemMert
Research
Selected Publications
Pickering J. et al. (2022) Democratising sustainability transformations: Assessing the transformative potential of democratic practices in environmental governance, Earth System Governance, Volume 11, DOI: 100131, ISSN 2589-8116.
Mert A. and J. Marquardt (2022) Reframing the Anthropocene: Democratic challenges and openings for sustainability. In The Routledge Handbook of Democracy and Sustainability (pp. 461-475). Routledge.
Mert A. (2021) Corona, Glasgow, and Beyond - Rethinking Environmental Politics Through the Lens of Critical Fantasy Studies. GCR21 Quarterly Magazine; November 2021.
Mert A. (2021) Critical Fantasy Studies Meets Global Cooperation Research: A New Research Agenda for Investigating Crisis Politics. GCR21 Quarterly Magazine; July 2021.
Mert A. and D. Hine (2021) ‘On Being the Right Size: Scale, Democracy and the Anthropocene’ in G. Dürbeck and P. Hüpkes (eds) Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity, Routledge, pp. 161-176.
Mert A. (2021) Challenges to Democracy in the Anthropocene in D. Chandler, F. Müller and D. Rothe (eds) International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., pp. 291-309
Chan, S., et al. (2021) Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development for a New Decade: A Catalytic Framework. Global Policy, 12(3): 245-259.
Behagel, J.H. and Mert, A., (2021) ”The political nature of fantasy and political fantasies of nature,” Journal of Language and Politics, 20(1):79-94.
Mert, A. (2020) ”Fantasy,” in An A to Z of Shadow Places Concepts, Fiona Miller, Donna Houston and Emily Potter, (eds), The Shadow Places Network. Available here.
Mert, A. (2020) “Democracy in the Anthropocene,” in A. Kalfagianni, D. Fuchs & A. Hayden (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 282-295.
Mert, A. (2019) “Democracy in the Anthropocene: A new scale,” in F. Biermann and E. Lövbrand (eds) Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107-122.
Mert, A. (2019) “The trees in Gezi Park: Environmental policy as the focus of democratic protests,” Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 21 (5): 593-607.
Mert, A. (2019) “Participation(s) in Transnational Environmental Governance: Green values versus instrumental use,” Environmental Values, 28 (1): 101-121.
Patterson J., et al. (2018) “Political feasibility of 1.5°C societal transformations: the role of social justice,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 31 (1): 1-9.
Gadinger, F. and M. Kopf, A. Mert, and C. Smith (2016) “Building Stories-Building Cooperation: The role of narrative and fiction in politics,” Global Dialogues 6 (11), Duisburg: University of Duisburg-Essen.
Mert, A. (2015) Environmental Governance through Partnerships: A Discourse Theoretical Study, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Mert, A. (2013) “Discursive Interplay and Co-constitution: Carbonification of Environmental Discourses,” in C. Methmann, D. Rothe and B. Stephan (eds.), Interpretive Approaches to Global Climate Governance: (De)constructing the Greenhouse, Routledge, pp. 23-39.
Pattberg, P., and M. Chan, A. Mert, F. Biermann (2012) Public-Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Emergence, Influence and Legitimacy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Reprinted (2013) in paperback, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
