Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Description

The intensifying global climate crisis necessitates a thorough reassessment of academic methodologies, conceptions, and agendas. Thus far, the sciences have taken the lead in comprehending and disseminating awareness of the escalating crisis. However, they have not achieved the urgent and extensive societal transformation that is imperative. To address this, it is crucial to centralise the expertise, knowledge, imagination, and values of the Humanities and Social Sciences in public and policy discussions concerning climate emergency response and adaptation. Many disciplines need to rethink fundamental aspects of their fields, teaching, and public engagement.

The network, comprising participants from various Humanities and Social Sciences faculties at Oxford, collaborates with climate scientists and external contributors. It establishes a prominent platform for interdisciplinary collaboration in a unique form. Its primary objectives are twofold. First, to develop, explore, and disseminate a broader framework for contemplating transformative responses to climate change and related threats. Second, to challenge the ways in which humanities and social sciences collaborate and generate knowledge in response to the current situation. The network strives to utilise the climate crisis as a catalyst for radical intellectual collaboration that is simultaneously public-facing while forging new paths for academic knowledge. Concurrently, as they rethink disciplinarity and scholarship by focusing on the climate crisis, they aim to develop new pedagogical approaches to educate the generations confronting the complex challenges of an increasingly precarious future.

The network intends to investigate the following themes:

• Rethinking teleologies: How can notions of progress be redefined and discourses of triumph over nature be rejected?
• Lessons from history: What can be learned from past climate and environmental changes?
• Decentring and decolonising the climate crisis: How does viewing the climate crisis through the lens of women's history, cultural practices, indigenous histories, nonhuman ethnographies, and archaeologies impact how it is understood?
• Redefining society: How can new models and histories of human societies be developed that recognise their interdependence with complex planetary ecosystems?
• Ethical considerations: How can values such as empathy, imagination, kindness, and love for others be integrated into climate change discussions, fundamentally shaping present actions and envisioning the human future?
• Politics and economics: How can we adopt a historical and lateral perspective on environmental politics and move beyond the prevailing focus on tensions between economic growth and climate change mitigation? What does a politics and economics that genuinely address climate change entail? Which political and economic "constraints" are genuine, and which are illusory?

Starting in October 2019, members are hosting a series of open workshops that welcome all interested researchers and students. They encourage inquiries from individuals interested in joining the core group of researchers, particularly those from currently underrepresented faculties. External organizations are also invited to participate.

The workshops will employ various themes to explore how each discipline is directly responding to climate and environmental issues, and to what extent they have adjusted their central objectives, concerns, methodologies, language, research, and teaching to accommodate a different future and societal needs. Collaborative thinking will be fostered around the elements that each participant identifies as beneficial to their respective disciplines. Ultimately, their aim is to cultivate a shared repository of approaches, strategies, and knowledge. In the second phase of the network, these will be employed to develop two projects that will be made available on their website: a Collaborative Syllabus for Climate Crisis and a Toolkit for Societal Transformation.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Contact details

On the map

Go to larger version of this map

Categorisation

Type

Project Tags

University affiliation(s)

University of Oxford
Oxford

University of Oxford
Oxford