STS Faculty in the News – Where Climate Meets Community

Written by Michaela Jarvis | School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Publication Date: November 6, 2025

Professor Kate Brown has been featured in an article in MIT News on MIT’s Living Climate Futures Lab. The Living Climate Futures Lab is made up of faculty and researchers from across MIT. Together, they are exploring the human impact of climate change.

“Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science, is also a participant in LCFL. Her current interest is urban food sovereignty movements, in which working-class city dwellers used waste to create “the most productive agriculture in recorded human history,” Brown says. While pursuing that work, Brown has developed relationships and worked with urban farmers in Mansfield, Ohio, as well as in Washington and Amsterdam.

Brown and Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry, teach a class called STS.055 (Living Dangerously: Environmental Programs from 1900 to Today) that presents the environmental problems and solutions of the 20th century, and how some “solutions” created more problems over time. Brown also plans to teach a class on the history of global food production once she gets access to a small plot of land on campus for a lab site.

“The Living Climate Futures Lab gives us the structure and flexibility to work with communities that are struggling to find solutions to the problems being created by the climate crisis,” says Brown.”

You can read the full article here: https://news.mit.edu/2025/where-climate-meets-community-1106