Joost de Moor is an interdisciplinary researcher at Stockholm University’s political science department. His research focuses on environmental and climate activism. Mixing humanities and social science backgrounds, he holds a BA in Cultural Science (Maastricht University), an MSc in Anthropology (KU Leuven), and a PhD in Social Sciences (University of Antwerp). He has published in political science (e.g. Environmental Politics), sociology (e.g. Theory & Society), and urban studies journals (e.g. IJURR) and applies both qualitative and quantitative methods.
De Moor’s research addresses how citizens – individually and collectively – become engaged to address society’s many environmental challenges – especially in European urban settings. A key focus is on how a political context marked by states’ inability to address environmental challenges shapes their activism. In his PhD dissertation (2016), he studied what elements of the political context shape activist strategies in the context of globalization, showing that perceptions of states’ inability to address environmental concerns advances local, ‘do-it-yourself’-types of environmental activism. He also studied the climate movement’s mobilization around COP21, analyzing how activists navigated a need to address climate change at a global level, whilst trying to localize activism in the face of failing global governance.
During his postdocs at Keele and Stockholm University, he has analyzed how environmental strategies focused on organizing resistance and those focused on building grassroots alternatives are related to each other, and how the unfolding climate crisis may shift activists’ focus from climate mitigation to adaption. De Moor is a lead coordinator of a global protest survey project on the Fridays For Future (FFF) school strikes in 25 cities across three continents, and the principal investigator of a unique three-wave panel study on political participation with an environmental focus in Flanders (2017-2019). He was part of a team that obtained a grant to study ‘visions for a fossil free welfare society,’ funded by FORMAS (the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development).