Lecture Series

The Sea Is Rising And So Are We? Climate Change and Social-ecological Transformation

Winter term 2021/2022

Tuesday, 18:00-20:00 (c.t.)
Room B1400, GW2 building, Universitäts-Boulevard 11/13, 28359 Bremen (hybrid and online-only events)

‘The Sea Is Rising And So Are We’ is a central motto of climate activists around the world. The crisis of the planet and its further endangerment are immediately tangible today. The urgency of the crisis is calling many things into question: forms of energy production and use, economic and consumer behaviour, concepts of (in)justice, property and the commons, as well as how we deal with global inequality and social precarity.

What contributions do the social sciences and humanities make to knowledge about this crisis and to dealing with it - and how do these contributions find their way into political practice? This is the two-part question at the centre of the lecture series. It will take place in the winter semester 2021/22 on Tuesday evenings (18:00-20:00 c.t.) - partly as a hybrid event at the University of Bremen and partly digitally. All university members are invited to the discussion, especially BA and MA students of all degree programmes and especially students of geography, ethnology and cultural studies. How are environmental destruction, climate change and colonialism connected? What impulses and initiatives do ‘researcher activists’ provide for science and society? What methodological or ethical problems do they have to contend with? What is our own university doing now, with what consequences? Why are questions of environmental (in)justice just as important as measurements of ice melt in the Antarctic? And how are the natural and social worlds connected, with which concepts and perspectives can these connections be organised differently?

Speaking and discussing with us will be, among others: Tania Li (University of Toronto), Steve Hinchliffe (University of Exeter), Özge Yaka (University of Potsdam), Johannes Herbeck, Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (University of Bremen); Cara New Daggett (Virginia Tech); Tim Schütz (UC Irvine), Oliver Geden (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin), and Nikhil Anand (University of Pennsylvania).

Concept & coordination: Michael Flitner (artec Research Centre for Sustainability), Jaqueline Buhk, Andrea Mühlebach and Michi Knecht (Institute for Ethnology and Cultural Studies, IfEK) in cooperation with the Bremen NatureCultures Lab (BNLC) and Worlds of Contradiction (WoC).

Registration procedure: Registration is required for each session. Please send an e-mail to seasrise@uni-bremen.de by 20:00 on the evening before the day of the event. A link for the online events and further information will follow after registration.

Goals for Sustainable Development: Ambivalences of a Global Agenda

Summer term 2019 – Winter term 2020/2021

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, the international community signalled its intention to initiate fundamental transformations in politics and society. The guiding principles of this agenda are manifested in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the associated 169 targets. However, while it is widely acknowledged that the SDGs and their targets are more comprehensive, ambitious and concrete than the previous Millennium Development Goals, there is also criticism of inconsistencies within and between individual goals and of the fact that the systemic causes of poverty, conflict and environmental degradation are ignored.

This area of tension is the focus of the multi-semester lecture series "Sustainable Development Goals: Ambivalences of a Global Agenda", which the artec Research Centre for Sustainability at the University of Bremen is organising from the summer semester 2019. In this series of events, speakers from the University of Bremen and other (inter)national research institutions will deal with different goals, discuss them critically and work out the necessities, potentials and limits of the 2030 Agenda. The lectures will focus on the following questions, among others: What problems and approaches to solutions are identified in the individual goals? Which potentials, limits and/or ambivalences can be found in the respective goals and which in the implementation of the respective goal in science, politics and society?

Is there a need for reform of the individual goals or the entire 2030 Agenda, or does their implementation actually hold out the possibility of a sustainable society?

In a kick-off event, the goals will be discussed from a scientific and political perspective, and a closing event will draw a conclusion of the series of events and provide a (hopefully) constructive outlook.

The lecture series is organised by the artec Sustainability Research Center and sponsored by the Kellner & Stoll Foundation and the University of Bremen.

NatureCultures

Winter term 2014/2015 – Summer term 2015

Tuesday, 18:00-20:00 (c.t.)
Rotunde in the Cartesium building, Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5, 28359 Bremen

In the 2014/2015 winter semester and the 2015 summer semester, the Bremen NatureCultures Lab is organising the lecture series ‘NaturenKulturen’. The series addresses social problems of great urgency at the changing interfaces between culture and nature and shows how the cultural and social sciences are responding to the associated challenges - overcoming anthropocentrism in the social and cultural sciences, developing new research approaches that combine nature and culture. Collaborative research perspectives and innovative questions are presented that take a new look at the complex connections between humans and non-human species, materialities and entities and aim to constructively shape socio-natural and techno-natural worlds.

The programme for this lecture series was organised by Bremen NatureCultures Lab, a cooperation between the artec Research Centre for Sustainability and the Institute of Anthropology and Cultural Research (IfEK) at the University of Bremen.