Rebecca Pearse

Beck Pearse is a sociologist with a background researching the political economy of climate and energy policy, inequalities and rural issues. Beck’s current research projects investigate labour and land relations in the industrial transition to a ‘net zero’ economy. She’s interested in how people work and negotiate change.

Before joining the ANU, Beck was a teaching fellow in the Political Economy Department at the University of Sydney (2017-2020). And before that she worked on a string of casual teaching jobs and ARC Discovery Projects as a research assistant / associate (2010-2016) while slowly writing a PhD. Working in those classrooms and research teams gave Beck essential training on the job, particularly in reading with curiosity across different disicplines, ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing.

Beck’s doctoral thesis was published as a monograph Pricing Carbon in Australia (Routledge/Earthscan, 2018) and documents the regulatory contradictions of Australia’s emissions trading scheme. Beck has co-authored reports for UN Women (with Raewyn Connell, 2014) and the City of Sydney (with James Hitchcock, 2019) on gender and urban inequalities respectively. She also contributed to a comparative study of coal in Australia, India and Germany led by James Goodman – The Coal Rush and Beyond (CUP, 2020) and to an ethnography of climate movement politics (Routledge, 2014) with James Goodman and Stuart Rosewarne. More recently, Beck contributed to Renewables and Rural Australia (2022) – the first social study of rural people’s perspectives on the NSW Renewable Energy Zones.