Dr Miriam Meissner (M.M.)

Miriam is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Political Ecology at Maastricht University and currently a Visiting Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art, London. 

Bridging the social sciences and humanities, her research examines cultural responses to the social, economic, and ecological consequences of capitalist accumulation and extractivism. Through the analysis of popular literature, film, urbanism, lifestyles, and (art)activism, Miriam explores how popular and social movement cultures politicize—or sometimes fail to politicize—forms of capitalist exploitation, including rent extraction, labor exploitation, the attention economy, financialization, and ecological extractivism.

A a central aim of her research is to develop cultural strategies to support contemporary movements for social and environmental justice.

Miriam's current research focuses on postgrowth and cultural politics, with her most recent projects focusing on 

• minimalist lifestyles, middle class discontent/desires and postgrowth politics
• class consciousness and postgrowth, and
• urban imaginaries for transcending the limits of existing circular city initiatives.

Miriam is the author of Less Is Not Enough: Minimalist Desires and Postgrowth Politics (forthcoming, Bloomsbury) and Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth (2017, Palgrave). She is also co-editor of Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess, and Abandonment (2016, Routledge) and The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries (2018). 

She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Political Ecology and on the board of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL).

In addition to her academic work, Miriam is a member of the Dutch degrowth network Ontgroei, a participant in the Postgrowth Cities Coalition, and a co-organizer of the 2021 International Degrowth Conference. She regularly contributes to media debates on social justice and the climate crisis, with her insights appearing in Trouw (Netherlands), Der Freitag (Germany), and the international platform The Broker.

For an overview of Miriam’s publications, please see: https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/persons/miriam-meissner/publications/