Dr. Vivian Price

Research, Publications and Creative Projects

For the last ten years I’ve focused on how workers, unions and communities are thinking about and acting on the transition away from the fossil fuel economy-- as well as how the green economy is being imagined and shaped through policy. I'm also interested in negotiations between workers and frontline and environmental justice communities, environmentalists, and Indigenous groups, and how power exerts itself in those spaces. Receiving a Fulbright Core Scholar award to teach and do research in Liverpool in 2019 and a Fulbright Specialist award to do research in Norway facilitated my ability to work internationally.

Most recently, in 2022, I’ve been most involved in three international research projects. Build It Green looks at how construction training in Europe, the US and Canada incorporates what we call “climate literacy.” That is, in what way trainers convey an understanding not just the how of green skills development, but also the why of climate change and the need to move towards low carbon societies. This is funded by the Canadian government through the Canadian Building Trades Unions. A second one, Just Transition in the Defense Industry, studies how workers in military industries in the US and the UK think about decarbonization and conversion of their workplaces towards more civilian purposes, funded by the British Academy. I am also culminating a project I’ve worked on for four years on the views of oil workers/unions in Norway, Nigeria, and North America about how to address the phasing out of oil. WAGE, Work, Labour, and Greening the Economy. We will be collaborating on writing together, planning a conference and finishing up a documentary.

My publications and creative projects reflect these interests:

• 2022, Bell, K, Price, V., McLoughlin, K., Cha, M.J., Skinner, L, Decarbonizing and Diversifying Defence in the United Kingdom and United States – A Workers’ Inquiry for a Just Transition. Report for the British Academy.
• 2022, Cha, M., Stevis, D., Vachon, T, Price, V. “The Just Transition Listening Project: Building a Just Socioecological Transition for All,” Political Geography.
• 2021, Cha, M., Price, V., Stevis, D., Vachon, T. Workers and Communities in Transition, a project of the Just Transition Listening Project, Labor Network for Sustainability. https://www.labor4sustainability.org/jtlp-2021/
• 2020, Price, V. Times are Changing, Minds are also Changing, in ed. Z Xiang, Minor Cosmopolitan: Thinking Art, Politics, and the Universe Together Otherwise. Diaphanes.
• 2019, Price. V, Labour organizing against climate change: The case of fracking in the UK in Building a sustainable future: the role of non-state actors in the green transition, eds. J. Hoff and Q. Gossett, Routled2018, co-author, Mapping Just Transition(s) to a Low-Carbon World, Report for United Nations, Research Institute on Social Development for COP 24.
• 2018 Price, V., Bury, M, and Zenhari, E. Visual Narratives and Political Awareness, Western Humanities Review, August. Vol. 72 Issue 3, p76-98