Time and Sustainability Doctoral Course

Details

Duration: Half-day online, 4 days in person.
Location: May 27th (half-day intro online, afternoon only). June 2nd in person at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. June 3rd-5th in person at SLU, Uppsala Campus.
Application: Extended to May 6th! Details below.
More Information and Schedule: Download the updated call for applications and program information (pdf 379 kB) .

Course Aim

This course will offer students tools to explore how different ideas of time, different rhythms and different assumptions about time and change are at play in their own and adjacent research areas – and to better understand the consequences of different timings for questions of power, justice, inequalities and the possibility of sustainable transformations.

This course will help students to engage with temporal questions in relation to their own research, support them to better understand the competing time frames and rhythms of different disciplines and decision-making practices, and position them well to develop collaboration across disciplines in future – a key factor in the development of their research careers.

Course Background

Achieving sustainable transformations is an interdisciplinary challenge demanding both scientific and social scientific expertise. Ecologists and climate scientists will need to work and act alongside political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists and environmental communications specialists if they are to achieve the sorts of social and practical changes needed to protect and regenerate thriving ecosystems. Despite this, students from all fields rarely get a chance to work in a sustained fashion alongside those from different disciplines.

This course will create an exciting interdisciplinary learning community bringing together students from Ecology and Environmental Communications/Humanities (in the main), with those working in adjacent fields across Sweden. They will come together to address a rapidly growing new research topic that is becoming critically important across sustainability debates in all disciplines: the question of TIME.  

While spatial differences are well understood in the field of sustainability transitions, less attention has been given to how time – more specifically, how different time frames, timing mechanisms, timing processes, time measures, rhythms and temporal narratives – influence both research practices and political decisions. Indeed, despite the fact that key sustainability conflicts are characterised by temporal conflicts – the mismatch between ecological and political time frames, the divergence in plant and pollinator timing as a result of climate change - time remains poorly understood in Ecology and Environmental Communication/Humanities. This matters because timing decisions have the potential to create significant negative impacts for those whose voices are rarely heard – the ecosystems whose existence is threatened and the marginalised communities whose livelihoods are at stake.

This new topic, which is rapidly developing internationally, is therefore particularly relevant to students who have an interest in how conflicts and tensions arise in sustainability debates and how these might be addressed in new ways. It will be of significant interest to those whose research engages with stakeholders – such as municipalities, industry partners, policy makers, community activists, farmers, citizen scientists – as well as living ecologies – soils, land, water, insects, animals.

Organisers

The course is organised under the August T Larsson Guest Professorship at SLU and is in collaboration with the KTH Centre for Anthropocene History. It will be led by Professor Keri Facer (Bristol University) and Dr Harriet Hand (Bristol University), supported by Prof Åsa Berggren. The course will also benefit from the assistance and contributions of Sanna Barrineau (Uppsala University), Anne-Kathrin Peters (KTH) and Lakin Anderson (KTH) who specialise in sustainability education and transformations.

Prof Facer and Dr Hand are currently leading an international British Academy Programme on ‘Times and the Just Transition’ – which convenes an international network of 25 scholars from 6 continents to study the relationship between time, justice and sustainability transitions. This summer course will be the first doctoral course of its kind to take this focus and draw on this work, providing SLU and other students with a unique opportunity to develop theoretical and methodological knowledge in this new field.

Pre-listening for the course: The Temporal Imagination Podcast episode 1 (Apple Podcasts or Youtube) https://www.temporalimagination.org/

Participants

Students are welcome to apply to join from any discipline concerned with sustainability transformations. There will be up to 15 spaces for PhD students. No prior knowledge of time/temporality questions required.

General Structure

The course will include:

• Lunches together and fika breaks (cost covered by the course)
• Personal reading and preparation
• Initial ice breaker / warm up online session (May 27^th) to orientate everyone to the topic
• 2 days (June 2 and 3) of hands-on and inclusive courses, using engaging game based and creative methods to exploring key themes of time and sustainability and developing students’ theoretical and practical knowledge to work in this area.
• 1 day (June 4) of individual work, using the lessons from the courses to interrogate and develop their own research project.
• 1 day (June 5) of presentations and group work and collective sense-making – showcasing the temporal aspects of individual studies, finding points of connection between them, identifying the potential for future collaboration.

Learning Targets

The course will help students to:

1. Interrogate and understand how temporal assumptions shape their own practices and their discipline’s approach to research 
2. Use diverse tools to notice and make visible competing human and multi-species temporalities at play in sustainability transitions and transformations
3. Support participants to critically reflect on the way that timing mechanisms and practices inform academic and social debates about sustainability issues
4. Consider how to work creatively with a repertoire of tools to diagnose how time is at play in your own research study and open up new areas for working with time in your own research. 
5. Become comfortable and familiar with working in interdisciplinary teams, recognising and learning from diverse perspectives and methods.

Applications

Students should write an approximately 500-word application to join the doctoral course, outlining their current research projects in 200 words and explaining in 300 words, what draws them to this topic and to the interdisciplinary nature of the course. Applications should be submitted to BOTH Keri Facer and Åsa Berggren, application deadline extended to May 6^th. Email Keri.Facer@bristol.ac.uk and Asa.Berggren@slu.se

Acknowledgements

This summer school is supported by the Society for Transformative Conversations, the August T Larsson Guest Professorship at SLU, the British Academy Times of a Just Transition Programme, and the Centre for Anthropocene History at KTH.