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Pödelwitz is an activist initiative  in the central german coal district, which is located in a village which was supposed to be evacuated for a planned expansion of a neighboring coal mine. After successfully resisting this expansion, the activists now promote social-ecological transformation in the village and the wider region. I will collaborate with them as part of my project in C-urge to study the role of justice in such transformations. Thereby we hope to arrive at an understanding of justice that is not opposed to urgent societal transformation in light of climate change, but a means of achieving this.

The main argument was that there are "biosocial phenomena" or "structural violence" that lead to the tendency for certain diseases or lack of treatment in populations, particularly those in poverty. Their three major findings were: they can make structural interventions to "decrease the extent to which social inequities become embodied as health inequities", proximal interventions can reduce premature morbidity and mortality, and structural interventions "can have an enormous impact on outcomes.