POLLEN Global Political Ecology Conference

The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the UAB and the University of Barcelona will be hosting the global political ecology conference POLLEN 2026, which will be held from 29 June to 3 July. The sessions will take place at the Hotel Exe Campus (Vila Universitària, UAB campus), in the UAB cinema hall, at the UAB Faculty of Science, at the ICTA-UAB, at the Faculty of Geography of the UB, and at the Barcelona Maritime Museum in Barcelona (Plaça de les Drassanes). The event will bring together more than 1,500 international researchers, activists, social entities and creators to debate energy transitions, data justice, militarised environmental governance, ecofeminism and indigenous knowledge systems. The central axis of POLLEN 2026 are the three plenary sessions that will address fundamental contemporary issues related to the topic, from anti-capitalist resistance to authoritarian capitalism. It will also include 250 round tables, workshops, screenings, games, poster sessions, book presentations and artistic interventions.

The first two plenary sessions, which will take place on 30 June at the UAB Exe Campus Hotel, will focus on global challenges. Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and environment at Syracuse University (New York, USA), will give a conference entitled “Authoritarianism Beyond the Regime: Environmental Publics, Capitalist Accumulation and Structural Persistence”, which will analyse the changes following the 2024 revolution in Bangladesh and feature contributions from other speakers on authoritarian trends in Hungary, Turkey, Latin America and Tanzania. Sara Mingorría, sociology researcher and member of the CSIC at the UAB, will offer the session entitled “When Territories Persist: Infrastructures, Resistance and Collective Futures”, which will address resistance to airport infrastructures and degrowth in the aviation sector, based on the massive protests of the ZeroPort platform in Barcelona. The talk will also feature interventions on territorial struggles in India, the Catalan Pyrenees, Sweden, and the Caribbean.