Rate My Professor Jason Hickel

Jason Hickel is an ICREA Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) and the Department of Political Science and Public Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a position he has held since 2024. From 2021 to 2024, he was Professor at ICTA and the Department of Anthropology at the same university. Prior to that, he served as Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2017 to 2021, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 2014 to 2017, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics from 2011 to 2014. He also held teaching positions at the University of Virginia. Hickel earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia in 2011, an MA in Anthropology from the same institution in 2008, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from the London School of Economics in 2012. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo.

Hickel's research centers on global inequality, political economy, and ecological economics. He has authored influential books including Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), named a book of the year by the Financial Times and New Scientist; The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017); and Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa (University of California Press, 2015). He is co-editor of Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014) and Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order (Berghahn, 2018). His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Nature Sustainability, The Lancet Planetary Health, Global Environmental Change, and Nature Communications, covering topics such as unequal exchange of labor, degrowth scenarios, and imperialist appropriation. Hickel holds an ERC Synergy Grant as Lead Co-PI for the REAL project on post-growth economies (2023-2029) and has received funding from Horizon Europe. He serves as Associate Editor of World Development, on the advisory panel for the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health, and the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.