Éric Pineault is a member of the Institute of Environmental Sciences at UQAM and chairs its research committee. He is also an associate researcher at the UQAM Research Chair in Ecological Transition and the scientific director of the Resilient City Hub.
He holds a joint doctorate in institutional economics and sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Université du Québec à Montréal (2002). Since then, the core of his research has been contributing to political economy and the critical theory of advanced capitalism. His doctoral research (1999-2002) focused on the emergence and structures of a regime of financialized accumulation within advanced capitalism. In 2003, he became a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where he continued to analyze financialization from a more empirical perspective, leading to numerous publications on this regime’s impacts on firms and households.
After the 2008 crisis, his research shifted to the structural and macroeconomic impacts of austerity policies, which he analyzes as a form of class struggle led by the upper echelons of society. This research program was developed in collaboration with social and labor movements opposing these policies in Quebec. In parallel, Éric Pineault developed an analytical framework for studying the development of the extractive sector in Canada, particularly how the oil sands industry shapes the trajectory of Canadian capitalism. This context introduced him to social metabolism and ecological economics, which have since become focal points of his research and writings. His current research on the social ecology of capital involves integrating these approaches and concepts into the political economy of advanced capitalism. He is also interested in Quebec’s energy transition from a degrowth perspective.