I am a designer by trade, educator by profession and organiser by inclination. I work at the intersections of commoning practices, postcapitalist politics and climate action. I specialise in creative communications, community building and just transition imaginaries.
I have been active in the climate justice movement since 2009. I co-founded disobedient action collectives (codeROOD, Fossil Free Culture NL, Queers4Climate) and co-developed the strategic frameworks of Climate Games, an action-adventure platform for peer-to-peer disobedience, and of Shell Must Fall, a grassroots campaign targeting shareholder meetings of the carbon major. I co-initiated the social housing projects NieuwLand, a postcapitalist intentional community, and de Nieuwe Meent, a rental cooperative based on patterns of commoning.
My PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam is on commoning practices in postcapitalist design. I taught the New Earth minor in Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam and I was the 2022 Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher on the creative repurposing of fossil energy infrastructures, and a lecturer on cultural strategies for decolonization and decarbonization at the University of Amsterdam.
Selçuk Balamir 