Damian White

Damian White is a political sociologist and political theorist. His current research interests are focused on the political sociology of design/architecture and planning; environmental-labor studies and tracing the fraught political economy and political conflicts surrounding post-carbon transitions; exploring histories and contemporary iterations of labor-centered and worker-centered design; exploring the political sociology of utopias, dystopias and global futuring particularly as they are expressed in film, the novel and political theory; populism, post-neoliberalism and the crisis of contemporary politics; and mapping the urban political ecologies of London, Paris, Boston, New York and elsewhere through walking, talking, photography and film.

White is the author/editor of five books. His first book Bookchin-A Critical Appraisal (Pluto Press, UK/University of Michigan Press USA, 2008) provided a critical engagement with social ecology and the critical theory and urban-ecological interventions of Murray Bookchin. With Chris Wilbert, he produced an edited collection on post-humanist and cyborg political ecologies entitled Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces and Places in the Twenty-First Century (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2009). Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (AK Press, 2011) with Chris Wilbert provided a commentary and edited collection on the writings of the architectural critic, environmental planner, social historian and anarchist/propagandist Colin Ward. Environments, Nature and Social Theory (Palgrave Macmillian, 2015) with Alan Rudy and Brian Gareau offers a critique and reworking of environmental sociology. He has just completed Designing the Just Transition?:Design Politics, Labor and Post Carbon Futures with the landscape architect Nicholas Pevzner (forthcoming 2026 Bloomsbury). This book explores how design, architecture and planning have engaged with questions of labor and ecology over the past 100 years. White has been on the editorial board of Design Philosophy Papers and CNS and has been a guest editor of Science as Culture and InTAR: Journal of Adaptive Reuse.

Prior to academia, White worked in the financial services industry in London for a number of years and taught “A level” political science and sociology to 16-to-18-year-old students in community college. He completed post-doctoral research at the University of East London on EU-funded research on sustainable technological innovation and the public understanding of science, and after this held academic positions at Goldsmiths College, University of London and James Madison University in Virginia. At RISD, White was head of the History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences department (2012–16) and dean of Liberal Arts (2017–22). He was awarded the Edna Schaffer Humanist Award in 2008 and the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012.