About

Miriam Meissner is an author, cultural theorist and political ecologist working at Maastricht Univeristy. Bridging the social sciences and humanities, Miriam’s work examines cultural responses to capitalist accumulation and extractivism. Through the analysis of popular literature, film, urbanism, lifestyles, and (art)activism, it explores how processes of capitalist exploitation—including rent extraction, labor exploitation, the attention economy, financialization, and ecological extractivism—are being politicized within popular mass and in social movement cultures. While Miriam’s earlier work focused on cultural imaginaries of financialization and urban development, her more recent work focuses on minimalist self-help, class conscousness and the cultural politics of postgrowth. A central aim of her research is to develop cultural strategies to support contemporary movements for social and environmental justice.