WORKSHOP FOR PhD STUDENTS

The ecological crisis challenges the categories through which the social sciences make sense of the world. It unsettles established distinctions between nature and society, the local and the global, knowledge and experience, while raising fundamental questions of justice, responsibility, and inequality.

At the same time, the ecological crisis is increasingly embedded in the everyday life of universities: in research and teaching practices, academic mobility, infrastructures and consumption, working conditions, emotions, and expectations about the future.

This workshop explores the tension between two ways of engaging with ecological questions in research: a poetic and imaginative approach, concerned with narratives, languages, aesthetics, and imaginaries; and a political and institutional approach, concerned with policies, governance, power relations, and conflict.

Together with four international scholars, PhD students will reflect on a series of questions:

What kind of intellectual climate do we encounter in the social sciences today when addressing ecological issues?

What forms of knowledge and imagination can help us not only describe the crisis, but also envision and enact alternatives?

What role can the university play in this process?

Rather than a conventional seminar, the workshop will be an interactive and collaborative space for discussion, experimentation, and collective reflection.

International Scholars

Sabine Dahl Nielsen
Associate Professor in Cultural Studies
University of Copenhagen

Marsha Meskimmon
Emerita Professor
Loughborough University, UK

Nina Möntmann
Professor of Art Theory
University of Cologne, Germany

Nikos Papastergiadis
Professor, School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne

Chair

Pierluigi Musarò
Professor of Sociology, Communication and Culture
University of Bologna

Registration

PhD students are invited to register by September 20 using the registration form.

Places are limited to 20 participants.