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Dr. S. (Selçuk) Balamir PhD

Faculty of Humanities
Capaciteitsgroep Media & Cultuur
Area of expertise: postcapitalist design, transition design, commoning practices, climate justice, just transition, environmental humanities, petrocultures
Photographer: Carin Verbruggen

Visiting address
  • Turfdraagsterpad 15
  • Room number: 3.02
Postal address
  • Postbus 94551
    1090 GN Amsterdam
  • Bio

    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, grassroots community building and developing just transition imaginaries.

    I have been active in the European 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, a transmedia action-adventure platform enabling 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 where I currently live, and de Nieuwe Meent, a rental cooperative based on patterns of commoning, currently under construction.

    My PhD in Cultural Analysis from University of Amsterdam is about commoning practices in postcapitalist design. I taught eco-social design at the New Earth minor in Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam and I was the 2022 Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. As part of the PITCH project, I’m currently doing a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam on petrocultures and the creative repurposing of fossil energy infrastructure in the just transition.

  • Petrocultures

    Postdoctoral research at the University of Amsterdam, on the creative eco-social reuse of fossil energy infrastructure to embolden and accelerate the just transition. Collaborating with E-WERK Luckenwalde, a lignite power plant turned into renewable energy provider and art centre.

  • Postcapitalist Design

    PhD research conducted in University of Amsterdam, on commoning practices in postcapitalist design, understood as the shared valorisation of labour, knowledge and artefacts.

  • After Shell

    A summer school for spatial design students and led by climate justice organisers, on how Royal Dutch Shell infrastructure will be decommissioned and repurposed in the coming decades.

  • de Nieuwe Meent

    Founding member and future resident of the housing cooperative based on the patterns of commoning, care, diversity and sustainability. The building combines co-living groups, social housing, shared functions and public spaces and it is currently under construction.

  • Publications

    2013

    • Balamir, S. (2013). Detection, Deterrence, Docility: Techniques of Control by Surveillance Cameras. Kunstlicht, 34(3), 38-42. [details]

    2021

    • Balamir, S. (2021). Unsustaining the commodity-machine: Commoning practices in postcapitalist design. [Thesis, fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam]. [details]
    This list of publications is extracted from the UvA-Current Research Information System. Questions? Ask the library or the Pure staff of your faculty / institute. Log in to Pure to edit your publications. Log in to Personal Page Publication Selection tool to manage the visibility of your publications on this list.
  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities