Many of today’s environmental challenges are deeply interwoven with structural problems of social systems and prevailing cultural worldviews about the relationship between nature and society. The Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) are essential to developing new transdisciplinary perspectives in research and teaching that take into account concepts of sustainability, environmental and global justice, ecological regeneration, system change and societal transformation.
In September of 2021 scholars and scientists from across Switzerland and beyond met at a symposium to launch the new Center for Environmental Justice and Sustainable Futures (CJSF) at Franklin University in Lugano. Titled «Retooling Knowledge: Sustainable Development Goals from the Perspective of the Environmental Humanities», the symposium investigated the various AHSS perspectives on environmental and sustainability challenges as well as their implications for new forms of research and teaching at the intersections of the Environmental Humanities and Sustainability Sciences.
Alison Pouliot, environmental photographer and natural historian, at the symposium at Franklin University Switzerland
Why: Bringing together facts, interpretations, and framings
Various contributions demonstrated how the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences can help us be better aware of, and understand and react more effectively to, the symbolic and narrative dimensions of sustainability problems. After all, it is not facts that guide action, but their interpretation and their framing. The AHSS can help formulate alternatives to the more traditional approaches from the scientific and economic perspectives to climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental problems, and identify new options for action both on the societal as well as the policy level.
In so doing they open imaginary and discursive spaces that allow for alternatives to the perception that the only effective solutions are provided by technology. This enables societal deliberation about possible positive futures that foster the necessary transformation of social and economic systems. Social innovations are as important as technological ones, and social entrepreneurship can serve society through socially responsible and culturally sensitive business models.
How: Three proposals for science policy
In the course of the symposium, the participants proposed three concrete ways to promote the potential of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for sustainability in Switzerland:
Centers of excellence on societal transformation, nature-based economy, and nature-based solutions
A new large-scale research program rooted in the AHSS (such as a National Center of Competence for Research, NCCR, or national research programs, NRPs) should be created that focuses on the two interrelated topics of societal transformation for sustainability, nature-based economy and nature-based solutions, both of which are already high priorities in EU research funding and policy.
Enabling inter- and transdisciplinary academic careers
Fostering these new thematic topics should be accompanied by securing career pathways and job security for young academics who work on inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research within the arts, humanities and social sciences as well as the natural sciences.
New inter- and transdisciplinary curricula
Practices at the society-science-policy interface also require new competences and therefore new curricula that connect expertise and skill sets from the social sciences, humanities, arts, design, architecture, and planning with knowledge from the natural sciences and the real-life realities of practitioners. The next generation of sustainability experts must be trained across the disciplinary spectrum in new ways of exchanging, validating, innovating, and consuming knowledge that focus on meaning as well as facts, while acknowledging that contested societal problems require solutions that are socially and culturally sensitive.
There should be a coordinated effort to develop new curricula and new programs within the AHSS departments, and between these departments and those of the natural sciences, to ensure their implementation across universities and universities of applied sciences.
This is a shortened and adapted version of a position statement that resulted from the symposium «Retooling Knowledge: Sustainable Development Goals from the Perspective of the Environmental Humanities» that was organized in collaboration with the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS) at Franklin University Switzerland, Lugano, in September 2021. It is based in part on a keynote speech by Markus Zürcher, Secretary General of the SAHS, at the workshop.
About the authors
Caroline Wiedmer is Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies (CLCS) at Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano. She is the author and (co)-editor of a number of books and articles circling questions of memory, space, the intersections of law, narrative and culture, refugee and migration studies, the maritime port as a space of trade and cultural exchange, and various forms of cultural sustainability. Together with Christoph Küffer, Wiedmer has built the Center for Environmental Justice and Sustainable Futures (CJSF) and is at work creating a transdisciplinary masters in sustainable cities.
Christoph Küffer is Professor of Urban Ecology at the Landscape Architecture School in Rapperswil (OST - Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences), senior scientist (Privatdozent) at ETH Zurich, an affiliated professor at the Division of Arts and Cultures at Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano, and a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel.
Cover
Via Unsplash, PublicDomain
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