Laur Kanger
Principal Investigator & Professor of Sustainability Transitions at the University of Tartu
Laur Kanger is a Professor of Sustainability Transitions in the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu. He is one of the co-creators of the Deep Transitions framework which conceptualizes industrialization through the long-term co-evolution of energy, mobility, food and other socio-technical systems.
He has contributed to theorizing transition pathways, policy intervention points for accelerating system innovation, societal embedding of radical innovations, the role of users in transitions, and energy justice. Thematically, Laur’s research has covered energy and mobility transitions, destabilization of the energy industry, and long-term patterns in the evolution of mass production and digitalization.
Laur’s current work, supported by the Estonian Research Council and the European Research Council, focuses on industrial modernity. He is leading a team researching how societal taken-for-granted assumptions about the natural environment, science and technology may block the much-needed sustainability turn.
Although Laur’s profile picture was drawn a decade ago, it has become amply clear by now that the amount of despondence captured on it was truly ahead of its time.