Nicole Kleinheisterkamp González

I completed my PhD in Geography at Syracuse University, where I worked with Matthew Huber and Tod Rutherford on questions of labor and the green transition. My research focused on how industrial workers and trade unions in Germany’s coal and automobile sectors navigate decarbonization and industrial change. Before Syracuse, I studied Biology and Integrated Natural Resource Management at Humboldt University of Berlin, where my interest in labor and environmental politics began through research on trade unions, energy democracy, and climate change. Alongside my academic work, I have worked for several German trade unions as an organizer.

Teaching

During my time at Syracuse University, I taught undergraduate courses across human and physical geography and gave guest lectures on labor geography and the green transition. At St John’s, I look forward to contributing to teaching and supervision in human and economic geography, particularly around labor, industrial change, and the political economy of the green transition. I especially enjoy bringing contemporary debates and empirical research into the classroom and encouraging students to think critically about how large-scale economic and environmental transformations are experienced and shaped in workplaces and everyday life.

I am a labor and critical geographer interested in the relationship between work, industrial change, and a just transition. My research focuses on how workers and trade unions navigate decarbonization in carbon-intensive industries, and what their experiences tell us about the possibilities and limits of a just transition. Drawing on a social reproduction lens, I look beyond the workplace to explore how climate policies and industrial restructuring intersect with economic security, welfare provision, deindustrialization, and everyday material concerns. More broadly, I am interested in the political economy of the green transition: who shapes it, who bears its costs, and how it can be made more socially and economically just. My current research builds on these questions by examining how changing state priorities, including growing military and security spending in Germany, affect public investment in decarbonization and social welfare. Across my work, I aim to bring labor perspectives into wider debates about climate policy, economic transformation, and social justice.

Recent publications

Kleinheisterkamp González, N. (2025). Agencies of transition: Why German coal workers are not accepting an energy transition despite social provisions. Environmental Research: Energy, 2, 015005.

Kleinheisterkamp González, N. (2023). The case for environmental labor geography: The role of organized labor in the climate crisis. Progress in Human Geography, 47(2), 317–332.

Kleinheisterkamp González, N. (2022). “Our Turks make the best German cars”: Racism as a tool to break workers’ power in the 1973 Ford strikes. Antipode, 54(3), 873–891.

Political writings in German at Jacobin.de