Publications

Mads Ejsing. 2025. New Materialism. Environmental Humanities Glossary. University of Copenhagen.

In the not-so-distant past, much of the humanities and social sciences treated the material world – the stuff of rocks, rivers, bones, and buildings – as passive scenery. Nature was the backdrop. Humans were the actors. We built, interpreted, imagined, and destroyed, while the world around us mostly reacted, inert and voiceless. But what if matter matters more than we thought? Emerging in the early 2000s, but drawing from a...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. Citizen Assemblies: Deliberative Mini-Publics for a Sustainable Future. A Climate for Sufficiency: 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report.

To enable “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” of society (IPCC ), there is a need to change societal norms and behaviour. Unfortunately, just when structural changes are needed the most, trust in governments is historically low, and many citizens feel that the current systems do not work for them (OECD 2024). Therefore, there is also a high risk of political conflict and polarisation around climate pol...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. Re-Assembling Democracy: A Nascent Theory of Nonhuman Political Participation. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2025.7218303

This article explores the concepts of political participation through the lens of new materialism and critical democratic theory. It argues that the concept of political participation must be expanded beyond rational and reflective actions by human beings in order to better encompass the agency of nonhuman entities. Drawing on the work of Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Noortje Marres, and others, the article offers a new theoreti...

Mads Ejsing, Lars Tønder, Ingrid Helene Brandt Jensen, Janus Hansen. 2025. Do we have time for democracy? Climate action and the problem of time in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196241279564

The urgency of climate change has brought democracy to a critical juncture. Existing democratic systems struggle to address the pressing time frames required for effective climate action. This article explores a fundamental shift in temporal orientation caused by climate change. Democracy’s linear and progressive image of time clashes with the expanding scales of temporality, encompassing both planetary and microscopic process...

Max Mailund, Dorte Nita Simonsen, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Toxic displacements: An environmental justice perspective on a chemical waste site in Denmark. Political Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103255

In this article we examine the problem of toxic waste and its entanglements with environmental justice in the Anthropocene from the perspective of Harboøre Tange – the waste site of one of the greatest chemical pollution scandals in Danish environmental history. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we show how environmental harms and inequalities are sustained over time through a series of ‘toxic displ...

Fernando Racimo, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rebecca Leigh Rutt, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Degrowth and decolonisation in academia. Degrowth Journal. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.09

Like other societal institutions, academia today faces an existential crisis. Rising inequality and authoritarianism, coupled with climate breakdown and collapsing ecosystems, are threatening the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and shared. At the same time, academics are coming to terms with their institutions’ role in contributing to these processes, particularly in the Global North. Many are recognising...