Education Insight: The Role of Universities in Addressing Climate Change

Jennie C. Stephens is a feminist, climate justice scholar-activist focused on transformation toward a more just, healthy, and stable future for all. She is Professor of Climate Justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and on the coordinating team of the Climate Justice Universities Union. She is a fellow at the Global Center for Climate Justice, Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at Northeastern University in Boston and was a Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard-Radcliffe (2023-2024). Her book Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future For All (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) proposes a paradigm shift to reimagine and restructure higher education to facilitate transformative social change toward ecological health and climate justice.

Her research, teaching, and community engagement focus on integrating transformative social justice, feminist, anti-racist, decolonial perspectives into climate and energy policy, fossil fuel phaseout, the renewable energy transition, energy democracy, gender in energy and climate, and climate justice in higher education. In her 2020 book Diversifying Power: Why We Need Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on Climate and Energy (Island Press), she argues that effectively addressing climate change requires diversifying leadership, redistributing wealth and power, and moving beyond mainstream male-dominated technocratic solutions to climate change. Throughout her career she has explored institutional and cultural innovation in energy and climate with a focus on societal transformation.

Jennie Stephens is on the advisory group of Feminists Communities for Climate Justice, is a member of the New England Grist Fixer Network, is part of the Climate Social Science Network, was a 2015-2016 Leopold Leadership fellow, and her book “Smart Grid (R)Evolution: Electric Power Struggles” (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores social and cultural debates about energy system change (co-authored with Wilson & Peterson). Before joining Maynooth University in Ireland, Professor Stephens was on the faculty at Northeastern University, the University of Vermont (2014-2016) and Clark University (2005-2014). She did post-doctoral research at Harvard’s Kennedy School and she has taught courses at Tufts, Boston University, and MIT. She earned her PhD at the California Institute of Technology in Environmental Science & Engineering and her BA at Harvard University in Environmental Science and Policy.