NINA VODOPIVEC ON POST-INDUSTRIAL TRANSITION AT KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY IN STOCKHOLM

Our colleague Dr Nina Vodopivec delivered a lecture on the politics of post-industrial transition at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on September 28, 2026. At the invitation of environmental historian Robert Gioielli, a former visiting researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, she visited the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment. The lecture was held as part of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory.

In her lecture, she focused on planning a post-carbon future in Zasavje, a former coal-mining region in Slovenia that is now included in the European Union’s Just Transition Mechanism. Drawing on years of ethnographic research on industrial workers and post-socialist transformations, she critically examined the understanding of transition as a linear shift from an industrial past to a post-industrial future.

She emphasised that planning for the future takes place in a region profoundly shaped by industrialisation and post-socialist deindustrialisation. Workers’ experiences reveal the knowledge, investments, expectations, and sacrifices through which they helped build factories and local communities, as well as the subsequent processes of dispossession and devaluation of their labour.

By connecting these experiences with the history of technological development and environmental struggles, the lecture highlighted the interconnectedness of social, economic, and environmental processes that are often obscured by the conventional distinction between industrial and post-industrial periods.

The lecture thus raised an important question: how can a deeper understanding of the long-term history of industrial regions contribute to rethinking the current transition and planning their future?