Abstract

This essay broaches the topic of people who are fully consumers for their daily provisioning, yet are disadvantaged by being poor, non-white, immigrant, women, and so forth; and it asks how they are experiencing and acting on the supposed "transitions" that are taking place in response to global climate change. Such people will be impacted by powerful changes largely beyond their control, yet their situation is largely neglected, with exceptions, in the "just transitions" literature. The article lays out a series of considerations for studying and acting on these processes. It begins with a vision of consumption as extended reproduction, a demanding household labor process of daily provisioning and longer-term persistence or change, done with commoditized technologies and resource streams, mainly but not entirely by unpaid women. Technologies, resource flows, and labor processes, then, provide ways to think about stresses, risks, and responses by disadvantaged peoples.

Keywords: race, gender, poverty, inequality, consumption, transition

How to Cite:

Heyman, J. M., (2025) “Current socio-environmental transitions and disadvantaged consumers”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1): 5747. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5747