Mr Luc van Vliet
Luc van Vliet is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Studies and Resource Management program at Crawford. He is a psychoanalytic political ecologist researching the libidinal economy of (platform) conservation in Australia and the EU. Luc's PhD program is constructed as a joint/dual award program between ANU and Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. His supervisors are Associate Professor Sarah Milne (ANU), Professor Sango Mahanty (ANU), Professor Bram Büscher (WUR), and Professor Robert Fletcher (WUR). With a background in philosophy, politics, and human geography, Luc has published on environmental, climate, and water justice. His research interests cover the psychic or libidinal dimension of ecological politics and its key signifiers such as ecological justice, degrowth, and sustainability. He is based between the Netherlands and Australia.
Research Interest
My interdisciplinary academic interests converge in the eclectic emerging field of psychoanalytic political ecology, which de Vries and Kapoor (2025) define as a discipline that "sees both nature and the subject as fundamentally ruptured, rendering it impossible to forge stable human-environmental relationships". From this fundamental theoretical orientation emerges a way of understanding ecological politics that prioritises 'the political' and hence the kinds of socio-environmental relationships that we want to inhabit.
HDR Supervisor/s
Sarah Milne Sango Mahanty Professor Bram Büscher (WUR) Professor Robert Fletcher (WUR)Thesis Title/Topic
The Libidinal Economy of Platform Conservation: Why Smart Technologies Herald the Next Attempt to ‘Value’ Nature