Environmental Humanities Workshop

This meeting was a follow-up workshop to the NIES -organized meeting in Oslo in September 2012. The chief objective of the meeting, besides enabling continued conversation among organizations and institutes in the field, was to seriously continue discussions carried out in Oslo on how the Environmental Humanities can impact policy in a broad sense. This was the second of a planned series of three coordinated meetings involving academic partner organizations and institutions meant to address capacity-building in the European Environmental Humanities and wider engagement of researchers in this field in international research and policy developments. The third meeting is planned for 2014 with the Rachel Carson Centre in Munich as host. 

Apart from bringing the outcomes of last year’s discussions to bear on this workshop a substantive part of the program included an informal meeting with key actors representing our stakeholder community or in a wider sense those outside of Academia who we believe should have an interest in Environmental Humanities research. If we claim, which we do, that the Environmental Humanities have a particular mission to impact on society and want to make ourselves known not only for our scholarly contributions but also for our usefulness in broad societal transitions on many timescales, then we need to be in dialogue with society, forge relationships and reflect on means and methods of societal collaboration. The idea was to have a discussion on how to work and engage more broadly and at the same time also address what specific areas are of most concern to the attending actors at this point.

Participants

• KTH-EHL Stockholm: Marco Armiero, Sverker Sörlin, Nina Wormbs
• RCC: Rob Emmett
• NIES: Steven Hartman (Mid Sweden University), Mark Luccarelli (University of Oslo)
• ASLE-UK: Adeline Johns-Putra (University of Surrey) & EASLCE: Hannes Bergthaller (University of Taiwan)
• ICEHO: Julia Lajus (European University at St Petersburg)
• Poul Holm, Trinity College Dublin, also representing the Vilnius group that will meet in September
• Karen Lykke Syse, University of Oslo, Center for Development and Environment
• Libby Robin, Australian National University, KTH-EHL, RCC, ICEHO, Australian Center for Environmental History
• Eva Friman, Center for Sustainable Development, Uppsala University
• Gísli Pálsson, University of Iceland, former head of the RESCUE program (ESF/COST)
• Asuncion St. Clair, CICERO, University of Oslo

External guests

Ulrika Björkstén, Swedish Science Radio

Göran Blomqvist, CEO, Riksbanken Foundation, Sweden

Mikael Karlsson, the Swedish Association for the Protection of Nature (200 000 members, founded in 1909)

Lars-Erik Liljelund, CEO, Mistra Environmental Foundation, Sweden

Piero Mazzinghi, Scientific Attaché, Embassy of Italy in Sweden

Lucas Pettersson, The Swedish Research Council, Sweden

Planning for this meeting was conducted in collaboration between the of the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment (KTH-EHL; also the host institution of the meeting), the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) and the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES), which is in turn hosted by the Division at KTH.