Two new projects starting soon at the KTH EHL!
Our project Towards ‘just sustainability’. Exploring grassroots initiatives to merge social and environmental justice has been selected by the International Social Science Council as part of their program Transformation to Sustainability.
With our partners in Brazil, India, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey we will explore the connections linking the struggles for environmental justice, the alternative practices implemented by grassroots organizations, and the production of new knowledge.
Justainability
Facing the global crisis, in its intricate blending of environmental and social problems, experts and policy-makers are called to propose solutions. There is some irony in the fact that the same who have driven to the current crisis are also the one who should solve it. Justainability looks in other directions. Grassroots organizations and local communities have resisted against contamination, expropriation, and exploitation while experimenting creative alternatives to the mainstream organization of collective life. Those experiences have contributed to the accumulation of transformative and transformed knowledge to understand the crisis in different ways. With partners in eight countries (Brazil, India, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey) Justainability aims to recover those experiences through the organization of local labs through which researchers, activists, local communities, and artists will gather stories of resistance and endurance. The results of those meeting will be available on an online platform.
The EHL is part of a just funded ITN Marie Curie Program entitled ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES FOR A CONCERNED EUROPE (ENHANCE). We are partner in this program with the University of Leeds, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and the Deutsches Museum. The program will give us the opportunity to hire new PhD students in the Environmental Humanties field. If you wish to know more about ENHANCE, please read here
ENHANCE (Environmental Humanities in a Concerned Europe) is a pioneering ITN network, providing the first fully coordinated training programme for Environmental Humanities in Europe. It will train twelve early-stage researchers (ESRs), and brings together three leading universities for environmental research (the University of Leeds, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm), Europe’s largest science and technology museum (the Deutsches Museum), and a further five Associated Partners from the private and third sectors. The overarching aim of ENHANCE is to provide ESRs with the academic and complementary skills training to be at the forefront of a new generation of Environmental Humanities research, and to be employable in a range of careers including environmental consultancy, risk assessment, research and development, green business management, sustainable technologies, media and environmental campaigns, and not-for-profit work (environmental and wildlife NGOs). Research and training will concentrate on three major research areas – natural disasters and cultures of risk, history of science and technology, and environmental ethics – and will address a series of core interlocking issues: wilderness and conservation; flooding and drought; climate change and risk; waste, environmental health, and environmental justice.