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About the Travelling Scientist

The Travelling Scientist: Mobility, Knowledge-making, and Sustainability in the 21st century.

The strength of our contemporary understanding of climate change relies upon the work of thousands of researchers, drawing upon data from around the globe. But these same research processes also contribute to climate change. Addressing global challenges means travelling globally, from data collection to the construction of research networks and the collaborative processes of producing reports that truly reflect their international scope. Emissions from these extensive travels aggravate the very problems that the climate research community sets out to alleviate. There is now a pressing need for the scientific community to discuss the relationship between sustainability, mobility, scientific quality, and the incentives built into contemporary academic life.

KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) wants to engage and challenge scholars in an open debate on how to make the scientific process more sustainable. Can we travel smarter, or enable exchange in other ways? What ways are there to combine a smaller carbon footprint with sustained – or even improved – quality of research?

On this site the, EHL will host an online forum from November 2014 to February 2015 on Mobility, Knowledge-making, and Sustainability . Welcome to follow us on this journey!

Read more about the background here.

Interested in contributing to the debate? Please get in touch on this email: envhumlab@kth.se