Paul K. Gellert

Visiting Scholar

Paul K. Gellert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he served as Director of Global Studies from 2018 to 2024. His research and teaching focus on the political economy of natural resources, especially in Indonesia, where he has conducted research for over two decades. His writing takes a world-historical sociology approach to the politics and ideology of what he has called Indonesia’s ‘extractive regime’. He has published in Globalizations, Rural Sociology, World Development, and other journals. He contributed to chapters on coal, utilities, and transport and on the Global South in Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment (Oxford) 2025. He serves on the editorial board of Journal of Contemporary Asia and the Journal of World-Systems Research and coedited Ecologically Unequal Exchange – Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Springer).

Participating Years

2025–2026

Mobility: Transit and Transformation

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities.

2024–2025

Anti-Capitalist Environmentalism

The existential problems of the planet are complex. Given capitalism’s obsessive growth primed by, for instance, land-grabbing, extractivism, social and economic hierarchies, and war, capitalist environmentalism leans heavily on tweaking armageddon to maintain its hold on futurity for the planet.